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COFVRIGIIT DEFOSnV 



A FREE LANCE 

BEING SHORT PARAGRAPHS 
AND DETACHED PAGES FROM 
AN AUTHOR'S NOTE BOOK 



BY 
FREDERIC ROWLAND MARVIN 



Away with that famed sentence Know thyself! 
'Tis not well put; Know others, to my thinking. 
Is a more apt and profitable maxim. 

— Menander. 




BOSTON 

SHERMAN, FRENCH & COMPANY 

1912 



11 '* 



n 



coptbight, 1912 
Sheemak, French 6* Compact 



^ 



©CI.A330680 



TO 

MY BELOVED WIFE 

I DEDICATE THESE PAGES, BECAUSE 

ALL THAT IS GOOD IN THEM, AND MUCH OF 

WHATEVER IS GOOD IN THEIR AUTHOR 

COMES OF HER TENDER AND PURE 

LOVE, AND IS DUE TO HER 

DEAR COMPANIONSHIP 



A valiant knight whose lance doth 
pierce the follies of the world. 

— A rchcedlogia 



PREFATORY NOTE 

A WRITER has always on his table, or con- 
"*■ ^ cealed in one or more of its drawers, liter- 
ary material that has failed of finding a place 
in any of his books. As time passes the mate- 
rial increases in quantity; and sometimes, be- 
cause of occasional revisions, it improves in 
character and becomes more worthy of preserva- 
tion. What shall he do with it? He may be 
moved by some inward impulse to cast it all into 
the fire. Yet not a few of those pages have cost 
him labor; and some of them may possess a 
modicum of interest for the general reader. 
Why should not the author, after winnowing 
from the grain so much of the chaff as it may 
be possible thus to separate from the ripe grain, 
gather what remains of the corn into some such 
granary as a book like this provides? The au- 
thor has expressed his opinions with freedom 
and frankness, and he believes there are in this 
world many candid men and women who will wel- 
come his frankness even though they may, in 
some cases, dissent from the conclusions arrived 
at. Only to such readers is this book addressed. 

F. R. M. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Vulgar Age 1 

Patrick Henrt 17 

Woman's World ^'^ 

Persokalitt . 39 

The Shadow 40 

Freedom ik Married Life 40 

PoPTTLAR SuFrRAGE 44 

An Interesting Exhibit of Injustice 44 

"Ye Olde Booke Man" 51 

Cheap and Nasty 64 

Blake's Vision of Angels 64 

Evert Man his own Jailer 65 

Anthont Tyrrell 66 

Development of the Spiritual Life 68 

Religious Nature 69 

God in Nature '^S 

Tuning the Pulpits , . 78 

Unfriendly Religion 78 

The Sharp Edge of Mercy 79 

"He Taught Them" 79 

Theology and Physical Condition 80 

The National Church and Parliament .... 80 

A Faith that cannot be Sung .82 

Ecclesiastical Profanity 83 

Institutions 83 

The Marriage of Cupid and Psyche 84 

Rivalry .85 

True Beauty Astonishes 86 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

a buttonless philosopher 87 

The Gentlemax 87 

Manners 87 

A LiTERAET Resemblance 88 

No Long Poem 89 

A Teue Standard 89 

Penance 90 

Style 90 

Seneca's Pilot 91 

The Sense of Sound in Literature 92 

Genius 92 

Discernment of Beauty 94 

The Five Best Poems in the English Language . 95 

A Perfect Temperament 96 

Civilization 96 

Cooperation 99 

Jefferson 99 

Our National Emblem 101 

swedenborg as a poet 112 

A College of Journalism 113 

Pharmacy 117 

Hymns Better than Creeds 120 

Victor Hugo 1^0 

The Present 121 

The Agnostic 121 

Modern Poetry Artificial 123 

SoNGLESs Verse is not Poetry ........ 123 

We are Ruled by the Dead 123 

Popular Government 124 

The Successful Politician 124 

Evangelical Books Dull 125 

The Sensuous World is Symbolic 126 

Where to Look 126 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Gladstone 126 

The United States too Young foe History . . . 127 

Longfellow 128 

A Brazen Jackass 128 

Simpler Relations 129 

Suppression op Knowledge 129 

Truth 129 

The Mob 130 

John Hancock ■. . 130 

Religious Instruction in Public Schools .... 132 

Socialism 133 

Two Republics 138 

British Rule 141 

Most Men have Ordinary Abilities 142 

The Approaching Period 144 

Contempt for Manual Labor 145 

Work is Honorable 147 

English Rule in America 148 

Minor Poets 150 

The Crowd 153 

The Bull Moose in Greek . 155 

The New Beelzebub 156 

Mosaics 157 

IjAis Dedicates Her Mirror to Venus 165 

Surroundings 168 

The Reward of Virtue . 169 

Physical Contact and Social Recognition . . . 170 

Frances Power Cobbe 184 



THE VULGAR AGE 

TF this paper required a motto, surely the au- 
thor could prefix to what he has here to say 
about the rudeness and want of refinement which 
he believes to be peculiarly marked features of 
the present age no words more pertinent than 
are those which Miss Mary Windsor addressed 
to a woman's suffrage association in convention 
at the time (October 20, 1911) in Louisville, 
Kentucky. The subject under discussion was 
"The Way to Interest the Uninterested." 

Miss Windsor was not in any wise what is 
called mealy-mouthed, nor did she go out of her 
way to find delicate phraseology. This is what 
she is reported to have said: "Whatever you 
do, don't be tiresome. Better be vulgar. This 
is a vulgar age. Be loud, be yellow, be any- 
thing to be picturesque." She followed her own 
advice, and her harangue was highly illustrative 
of the manner of speech she recommended to her 
sister reformers. 

She was surely right ; this is, indeed, a vul- 
gar age — an age of vulgar men and women. 
Whether Miss Windsor's words were strictly 



2 A FREE LANCE 

speaking "yellow," we shall not undertake to de- 
termine ; but they were beyond all question "pic- 
turesque," though not in precisely the way the 
few lovers of fine speech who still exist could 
wish. The only criticism we shall pass upon 
Miss Windsor's harangue is that the advice 
which it contained was wholly unnecessary. 
Most of the suffrage conventions called together 
by women are, so far as we know them, suffi- 
ciently vulgar, and require no exhortation to in- 
creased vulgarity. The lady brought coals to 
Newcastle when she recommended to her sisters 
the chrome-colored speech of which her own 
highly pigmented address was an excellent ex- 
ample. 

The Age, as we commonly use the word, is 
something more than a fixed period. Indeed, 
time is an inconsiderable element in what we call 
the age. The age includes the men and women 
living at the epoch under consideration; it in- 
cludes also the speech of these, and their deeds 
as well. Nothing contributes more generously 
to the vulgarity of the present age than much 
of the language commonly employed in ordi- 
nary conversation and in the newspapers, books, 
and magazines which are everywhere published 
and read. The vulgarization of literature is 



THE VULGAR AGE 3 

one of the most striking features of the age in 
which we live. 

We have what is commonly called "The Yel- 
low Press." Some of our most mendacious pa- 
pers have a very large circulation. Their ed- 
itors stop at nothing. Scandal, slander, shame, 
and infamy are written large on every page. 
Sensational lies are dressed up in showy head- 
lines. An appeal is openly made to the worst 
passions. Good causes and worthy enterprises 
are scoffed at and evil things are encouraged. 
Of course the press described is something much 
worse than vulgar, but it is the vulgarity that 
concerns us now. The Satanic press is always 
vulgar. Its readers are vulgar, and their tastes 
and desires are like themselves. 

But there are other papers which do not an- 
swer to the above description and which are, 
nevertheless, in every sense of the word vulgar. 
Their editors would be shocked at the thought 
of encouraging vice, and yet they are employ- 
ing in every issue the phraseology of the vicious 
and criminal classes. They familiarize their 
readers with words and expressions coined and 
circulated by worthless and profligate men, by 
lawbreakers and disturbers of the peace. They 
make frequent use of the word "yellow," which 



4 A FREE LANCE 

is a slang word setting forth the kind of paper 
which they themselves publish. The papers we 
are describing make unrestricted use of such 
words as "pal" (an accomplice or a partner in 
crime), "swipe" (to grab a thing when its owner 
is not watching), "pull" (a political claim or 
requisition), "bounce" (to discharge an employe 
unceremoniously or ungraciously), "boodle" 
(money fraudulently obtained in the public serv- 
ice), "skip" (to run away in the night, or to 
elude an officer of the law), "cop" (a police- 
man), "jug" (a jail or a workhouse), "graft" 
(stolen money), and "bag" (to arrest or cap- 
ture). These and other specimens of criminal 
phraseology are made free use of by such pa- 
pers as I am describing. Let none of my 
readers think I am portraying the Police Ga- 
zette and papers of that kind. I am setting forth 
that paper and hundreds of other papers 
of all kinds. I am describing for you, my 
good reader, the morning paper that you 
find on your breakfast table, and the evening 
paper that you enjoy after the labor of the 
day is over. You may not be greatly harmed 
by such periodicals (though that is by no means 
so certain as you may think), but what shall be 
said of their influence over the tender minds of 



THE VULGAR AGE 6 

your children? You would not yourself in the 
presence of your children make use of the lan- 
guage we are criticising. Let us hope you would 
not use such language anywhere. What is to 
be thought of headlines constructed after the fol- 
lowing fashion? 

"The District Attorney Consults His Pal;" 
"More Boodle for the Ninth Ward;" "Let the 
Jurymen Bag the Facts ;" "Grafters at Work in 
the Windy City;" "Our Alderman Gets a Swat 
in the Snout;" "He Skipped for Parts Un- 
known ;" "Democrats Get the Jump ;" "The Boss 
Kicks." 

All this may have a decidedly American flavor, 
suggestive of "uncrowned sovereigns," but there 
is absolutely nothing about it that suggests any- 
thing better than the peculiar flavor named. 
This is an age that finds great pleasure in out-of- 
door sports that have in them much that is whole- 
some and invigorating; but there is about them 
almost nothing that brings out the dignity and 
beauty of the human form. In ancient Greece 
nature was undressed, and the human figure in 
all its nude beauty, without a thought of immod- 
esty, impressed itself upon the imagination in 
such a way as to educate the sense of artistic 
beauty. But our baseball games and athletic 



6 A FREE LANCE 

sports are commonly rude, and never suggestive 
of refinement. Yet to the reporting of games 
played by college students and by professional 
players our newspapers devote much space. But 
they seldom rebuke the gambling and the rowdy- 
ism that are not often wanting ; on the contrary, 
they usually resent any eifort made by the better 
element in society to prevent or even restrict 
these unfortunate features. Many papers openly 
espouse the gambler's side in any controversy 
that may occur between what are called "book- 
makers" at the race-track and good men and 
women who endeavor to enforce the law against 
gambling. Such papers are, apart from their 
viciousness, vulgar to the very last degree. 
The age that sustains such papers and thinks 
well of them is correctly described as a vulgar 
age. 

Think of the vulgarity of an ex-President of 
the United States who could travel from one 
end of the country to the other, sounding his 
trumpet with equal vigor and energy in willing 
and unwilling ears ; blowing his own praise in the 
face of friend and foe. Washington did nothing 
of the kind, nor did Lincoln. Think of a man 
storming, as it were, heaven and earth in one 
wild effort to make himself the nominee of a 



THE VULGAR AGE 7 

reluctant party. Could anything be more rude 
and repulsive than Mr. Roosevelt's self-ex- 
ploitation, full to the brim and overflowing with 
an obnoxious personality? 

Not a political campaign goes by without my 
receiving from candidates (strangers, most of 
them, to me) photographs of themselves, and 
sickening praise of their own work. Verily this 
is indeed a vulgar age! One man of whom I 
knew absolutely nothing — a stranger — ^wrote to 
tell me he was a man of exceptionable probity. 
What his letter made clear enough was that he 
was a man of exceptionable impudence. An- 
other seeker after political preferment sent me 
a picture of himself. The face was that of a 
bruiser. I might ignorantly have voted for 
him, not knowing anything about either him or 
the opposing candidate, had I not accounted 
that face of brass a sufficient warning. Alas! 
these are the kind of men that fill too many of 
our political offices and other places of trust. 

The extreme partisan feeling of most of our 
secular papers with regard to political questions, 
methods, and affiliations, is in every way vulgar. 
Nothing can be more wanting in good sense, fine 
feeling, and noble purpose than an unconditionally 
partisan club or newspaper. In a world wherein 



8 A FREE LANCE 

nothing is lifted above imperfection, and wherein 
no man is infallible, it becomes all of us to be 
charitable in judgment, ready to reverse what- 
ever line of conduct we may have adopted, and 
cautious in the expression of opinion. The slang 
phrase "cock-sure," which means overconfident, 
expresses in a rude way the intellectual and moral 
attitude of the vulgar partisan. The crass 
champion or reformer will denounce whatever man 
or measure happens to lie in his way. The vul- 
garity of the exhibition which he makes is a thing 
of which he never even dreams. He cannot un- 
derstand how anything can be good that he op- 
poses, or that opposes him. 

As a matter of fact, all political parties are 
corrupt, and the man who yields any of them an 
unconditional loyalty is, in all probability, him- 
self like unto them. But it is also true that who- 
ever denounces them all without reserve is quite 
as far removed from good sense and reason. 
Parties are essential to the welfare of our coun- 
try. Different parties act as secret agents to spy 
out faults and misdeeds, each holding up to view 
the party that opposes its plans and purposes. 
It is, of course, an illustration of the old saying, 
"the pot calls the kettle black;" but as in this 
case both pot and kettle are black, there is 



THE VULGAR AGE 9 

no small need of their various and often bitter 
assaults. Undoubtedly the Republican party is 
quite as foul as the Democratic party represents 
it to be, and the Democratic is no better. 

Of course this mutual exposure is vulgar. 
Gentlemen do not give each other opprobrious 
names; but then we must remember that they 
only are gentlemen who conduct themselves in a 
decorous and seemly way. This is not a gentle- 
manly age; on the contrary, it is what we have 
called it, a vulgar age ; and in nothing is it more 
vulgar than in its political diatribes and evil 
deeds. The language used by otherwise respect- 
able papers and public men in dealing with polit- 
ical opponents, the slang, the vilification, and the 
false charges, all go to prove this age, in what- 
ever concerns personal refinement, a rude and 
coarse age, though in material resources, it has, 
of course, the advantage which comes of being the 
inheritor of all the wealth and wisdom of the 
world. 

The age of Nero and of his immediate predeces- 
sors and successors was one of unreportable vice 
and crime and of the greatest extravagance, but 
it was not the vulgar and spiritless age that the 
world has seen many times, and will no doubt 
see many times in the long centuries to 



10 A FREE LANCE 

come. Nero killed his mother, a thing no sover- 
eign of the present day could do and retain 
his throne. He gave away vast sums in money 
and treasure taken from the people by robbery. 
He was, in all probability, a madman, and his 
reign was a nightmare. But he was not vul- 
gar; he was a man of many natural gifts and 
of fine culture. He loved beauty, and gave 
enormous sums for its expression in art. 
Under the Caesars Rome became a miracle of 
beauty. 

Architecture flourished on every hand. 
Greece also, and other nations as well, rejoiced 
in the splendor of marble and bronze. It was 
an age of both material and intellectual refine- 
ment and elegance. But now contemplate for 
one moment the shapeless structures that we call 
public buildings. Take, for instance, the State 
House or Capitol at Albany in the Empire State, 
the most populous and wealthy of all the States 
in our Union. Its cost was very great, but 
as a specimen of good architecture could there 
have been a more humiliating failure? It 
is extravagantly decorated and enriched within, 
and upon its walls hang many interesting 
and a few meritorious pictures; but who would 
think of describing it as an architectural 



THE VULGAR AGE 11 

success? Call to mind the so-called statues that 
disgrace Central Park in the city of New York. 
Consider also the general distaste for poetry 
which in this age makes every publisher unwill- 
ing to bring out a book of verse. It matters not 
how good the book may be — no one will purchase 
it, and only here and there may be found a per- 
son who would read the book were a copy of it 
given him. Virgil and Horace would starve in 
an age like ours. 

I am neither excusing nor am I condoning 
the crimes of Nero. I am only comparing his 
love of beauty with our want of such love. 
There may, perhaps, have been some cogent rea- 
sons for Nero's murder of his mother. She was 
a woman of great strength of mind, and she 
aspired to an unlimited authority. She was also 
equal to any crime, and beyond all doubt her 
imperial son greatly feared her. She was a 
much stronger woman than he was man, and 
he knew it only too well. Had he not taken her 
life it may be that she would have taken his. 
She caused her rival, Lollia Paulina, to be slain, 
and commanded the executioner to bring her head 
to her that she might assure herself that it was in 
truth her rival and none other that had been 
dispatched. She pushed back with her own 



m A FREE LANCE 

fingers the dead lips that she might see if the 
teeth were those of LoUia. Such a woman 
would stop at no deed of violence, and Nero be- 
lieved his own life to be in danger so long as 
she breathed the breath of life. Perhaps after 
all the crime of Nero was not so desperate as 
history represents. 

Nero loved poetry, art and music as few 
sovereigns of the present age love anything that 
ministers to human culture. His passions were 
violent but his tastes were fine. He may have 
been a madman, but he was not a fool. Agrip- 
pina was herself as extravagant as was her royal 
son. She was an artist in dress, and attired 
herself in robes that were of extraordinary 
beauty. Every robe was of a new design. We 
are encased in inelastic fashions that make all 
women look alike, but she made her own fashions, 
and into them she put taste and originality. 
Her rival Lollia Paulina was also an artist in 
dress. It is recorded of her that she wore in 
public a robe that cost what would be in our 
money a little over $1,664,580. To this amount 
must be added the price of the gems that she 
wore with the robe. Jewels in Rome at thait 
time did not depend for value mainly upon the 
commonplace cutting of established patterns, 



THE VULGAR AGE 13 

but upon the marvelous beauty of original de- 
signs. Each stone had its own peculiar beauty 
in both the gem itself and the design. 

Rome was in the day of its splendor a superb 
city. From Ostia-on-the-sea to the imperial 
city there extended for fifteen miles a street of 
palaces, villas, tombs, statues, and works of art 
of every kind. In the city itself everything 
was arranged with a view to beauty and luxury^ 
Palaces of green, white, and tinted marbles rose 
on every side. It is true that the conveniences 
of modern life were wanting, and that beneath 
all this splendor there was a vast misery. 
There were no hospitals and no institutions of 
mercy and charity for the poor. Slavery was 
common, and the rights of what we call "the 
people" were not generally respected. The few 
and not the many created all this beauty, and 
to them it belonged. 

To-day things are changed. This is the age 
of the common people — an age of great comfort 
and of measureless vulgarity. The peasant now 
enjoys a luxury of which the early king never 
dreamed. The common people have come to the 
front, and they are taking possession of the 
world. If only they were trained to use with 
wisdom their new power, we might hope for 



14 A FREE LANCE 

good results ; but in every age since the world 
began wisdom, good judgment, and real ability 
have been the possession of the trained and 
educated few. In the very nature of things it 
must always be so. No government can long 
endure that rests upon the unenlightened judg- 
ment of the untrained masses. 

Writing of America to an American more 
than fifty years ago, Macaulay said: "Your 
republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid 
waste in the twentieth century as the Roman 
empire was in the fifth, with this difference, that 
the Huns and Vandals who ravaged the Roman 
Empire came from without, and that your Huns 
and Vandals will have been engendered within 
your own country and by your own institu- 
tions." 

Macaulay's prophecy is coming true. Popu- 
lar institutions are doomed. A country gov- 
erned by labor unions, uneducated foreigners, 
and irresponsible bosses must in the very nature 
of things perish. The majority of men are of 
lowly birth and humble circumstances; they are 
imperfectly educated, if they have any educa- 
tion at all; and they are dependent upon daily 
labor for daily bread. They have neither the 
time nor the training required for the great 



THE VULGAR AGE 15 

and difficult work of governing themselves and 
their fellow men. 

The fierce commercial competition of this age 
is intrinsically vulgar. It reduces thousands 
of men to the level of a machine, and it gives 
to the few, as their principal aim in life, ma- 
terial supremacy, while it gives to all, as their 
chief good, daily bread. It ignores all ideal 
considerations. It is a return to what has been 
called "natural selection" — the survival of the 
fittest. It is the conducting of human affairs 
upon the same principle upon which the beasts 
conduct theirs. There is, however, this differ- 
ence: the struggle of tooth and claw is natural 
and proper to the brutes, while it is not natural 
and proper to man in a civilized condition. 
There is nothing degrading in commerce when 
pursued as a means and not as an end. But m 
this age it has become an end for which men 
strive with a fury of competition at once cruel 
and vulgar. The one great distinction in this 
age between man and man is the possession of 
wealth. The aristocracy of America is one of 
dollars and cents, and not one of brains and 
morals. A wealthy man in the far West shot 
himself because he had lost his fortune, though 
he was young and in good health, and might 



16 A FREE LANCE 

create another fortune without great difficulty. 
He said that he could not live without money. 
To have it known that he was poor was to be 
disgraced. Money was all the world to him 
because in this age it includes personal stand- 
ing and even character. He saw no beauty 
where there was no money. 

'Compare that man with Gainsborough, who 
found delight in every melodious sound ; who was 
entranced by every glorious landscape; who re- 
joiced in the freshness of spring and in the 
splendor of autumn. 

Poetry and the fine arts have much to do with 
civilization. The age that neglects these is ipso 
facto a vulgar age. But it is the common com- 
plaint of all literary men that poetry is not 
only disregarded but positively disliked by the 
age in which we live. No publisher will now 
risk the sale of a book of verse, and with good 
reason, for very few care to read that kind of 
a book. To be an eminent poet was once a mark 
of distinction; but now the writer of good verse 
apologizes for his genius. The last generation 
saw weU-nigh the last of the brilliant New Eng- 
land Transcendentalists disappear from the 
face of the earth. Where now have we authors 
to take the places made vacant by the death of 



PATRICK HENRY 17 

Lowell, Emerson, Longfellow, and Whittier? 
Among all our novelists have we any that may 
be compared with Cooper and Hawthorne? 
Where are the peers of Parkman, Prescott and 
Motley? It is safe to say that many a year will 
go by before again we have a genius like that 
of Poe. 



PATRICK HENRY 

PATRICK HENRY may have been the "for- 
"*■ est-born Demosthenes" that Byron called 
him in "The Age of Bronze," but a man trad- 
ing in human flesh and blood, and bequeathing 
slaves and cattle alike in his will, is hardly the 
man to cry, "Give me liberty or give me death !" 
He denounced Caesar, Charles the First, and 
George the Third, in one breath, but was he 
himself less of a tyrant than any or all of these? 



WOMAJTS WORLD 

WOMEN live in a world in many ways very 
unlike the one in which men live. The 
lives of most men are, from a woman's point of 
view, hard, inelastic, materialistic, and cold. 
The man's life may rest upon a substantial 



18 A FREE LANCE 

foundation of fixed realities; but women are by 
nature poets: they idealize whatever they touch, 
and it is to this idealizing tendency that they 
owe the romance and charm of the wonder- 
world wherein they dwell. No doubt, in this 
idealizing which underlies the feminine life there 
is a certain unreality that would lead the mas- 
culine mind astray; but women find in it a sub- 
stantialness as true and real as any matter-of- 
fact experience known to man's grosser world 
of "things as they are." Woman's world is an 
illusion only in the sense in which all worlds are 
illusions. There is no Dvng an sich for any of 
us. We live in worlds of our own creating. 

Yet with all the idealizing characteristics of 
the feminine mind, women have never excelled 
in the things that demand constructive or crea- 
tive genius. The great musical composers, like 
Beethoven, Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Wagner, 
are all men. You will not find a woman among 
them. The supreme painters, such as Michael 
Angelo, Raphael, Murillo, and our modem Tur- 
ner, are every one of them men. There is in 
all the ages no record of a woman who was ac- 
counted a great sculptor. You will not find 
among women a poet of the first order, like Ho- 
mer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, or Milton. 



WOMAN'S WORLD 19 

The feminine mind is not constructive or crea- 
tive. Women are well able to appreciate the 
arts, but never will they be found among the 
gifted few who construct the charm and allure- 
ment of a great original work of whatever kind. 
It is true that women have never had an oppor- 
tunity of understanding and enjoying these 
things ; at least, they have not had man's op- 
portunity with all its wealth of privilege. They 
have, however, made good use of such places and 
occasions as have come to them. What will be 
the final issue of their eifort to win for them- 
selves a larger world of privilege, it would be 
hard to say. Most of the opposition they must 
encounter in their demand for suffrage will 
come, no doubt, from certain well-to-do women 
who have themselves no need for the ballot, 
and from Roman Catholic and Episcopal priests 
who have their own reason for interesting them- 
selves in the matter. They will in all proba- 
bility some day succeed in their demand, because 
the world is moving in that direction, and the 
spirit of the age more than any effort of theirs 
will determine the outcome. But of how much 
value the new life of political activity will prove, 
no one can even remotely conjecture. 

The masculine temperament is essentially ego- 



20 A FREE LANCE 

tistic. Man is his own centre, and around himself 
he revolves. The woman's temperament is ideal- 
istic. She finds the centre of her hopes and de- 
sires, not in herself, but in a nobler world of her 
own making. Man rises above society and 
seizes upon the world, which he shapes to his 
own purpose. Woman finds her happiness in a 
society that she has formed for herself and that 
reflects her own mind. For her to rise above 
society would be for her to rise above herself. 
The social circle is feminine, and its verdict is 
always a woman's verdict. 

Much has been said against the double stand- 
ard of morality which punishes a woman for the 
sin it permits, and in some cases even applauds, 
in the man. It is said that sin is sin, irrespec- 
tive of sex. There is of course an ethical sense 
in which that is true, but for all practical pur- 
poses there will be, so long as there are two 
sexes, two separate standards. The judgment 
against moral delinquency comes through so- 
ciety and is a' social judgment. Man is in great 
measure independent of social exactions. He nei- 
ther made them nor has he ever fully conformed to 
them. To use a vulgar phrase, "He snaps his 
finger in their face and goes his way." That 
is because he has a way of his own in which to 



WOMAN'S WORLD 21 

go. Woman never conformed to a masculine 
social standard ; there never was in all the world 
and the ages such a standard to conform to, 
nor could there be, in the nature of the case. 
No more could man be required to conform to 
an essentially feminine standard. There will 
be but one standard to which both willingly con- 
form when both unite in constructing it. It 
will be androgynous, combining both sexes ; that 
is to say, it will be impartial in dealing with 
the problems of life. When we have that stand- 
ard, we shall have also a common verdict and 
mutual obedience. 

Man's standard of morality, were there such 
a thing in existence, would bear less heavily 
upon woman than does the present standard 
which woman has herself constructed. The 
woman who falls receives from the circle in 
which she moves judgment without mercy. This 
unlovely severity springs in large measure from 
self-righteousness. The consciousness of inter- 
nal rectitude is for most of us a very dangerous 
thing. It is a blast of moral winter that seals 
up every fountain of compassion, turning the 
human heart into ice. Had the good women of 
to-day been living when our Saviour was on 
earth, and had they been present when He said 



22 A FREE LANCE 

to those who accused the woman taken in adul- 
tery, "Let whoever is without sin among you 
cast the first stone," they would, every one of 
them, have grabbed as many stones as they 
could lay hold of, and they would have show- 
ered them upon the offender's head with all the 
cruel vindictiveness of a self-righteous spirit. 
The inhumanity of the social verdict and of its 
execution stands out in fearful distinctness over 
against the compassionate words of Jesus, 
"Neither do I condemn thee; go and sin no 
more." 

A very intelligent woman told the writer of 
this that the ferocity of the social judgment 
sprang from the most abject fear. "The woman 
who goes astray," she said, "endangers the home, 
which is woman's special province. If she goes 
unpunished, we may at any time lose a husband, 
and see a home broken up. When she tempts a 
man she wrongs a woman. Self-defense calls 
for the most desperate measures. We cannot 
take her life, but we can do more — we can crush 
her soul." I said, by way of reply: "Most 
women who fall are tempted by men before they 
in turn become tempters of men. I should think 
that of the two, the man would be usually the 
more guilty. Is it, then, reasonable to ruin the 



WOMAN'S WORLD 23 

woman while the man goes uninjured and even 
unrebuked?" She answered, "We could not 
reach the man if we would. It is to keep him, 
and not to lose him, that we wage war upon the 
tempter. His sin may be before God as great 
as is that of the woman, but its effect upon the 
home is not so disastrous." 

It all comes back to the defense of the home. 
This ferocity springs from a fear, and very nat- 
urally the fear is combined with a deep feeling 
of indignation and, in many cases, of revenge. 
The wrong is great, but no wrong can be so 
great as to justify another wrong, Shake- 
speare never wrote truer lines than these : 

**In the course of justice none of us 
Should see salvation; we do pray for mercy; 
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render 
The deeds of mercy." 

To "crush a woman's soul" is, so it seems to 
the writer, to do a thing the divine Son of Mary 
would brand as a deed of darkness. How a 
woman can thus deal with a human being and 
yet pray to be herself forgiven as she forgives, 
is an unexplained mystery, unless we suppose 
hypocrisy. 



24 A FREE LANCE 

Women are naturally Christians, because 
Christianity is a feminine religion. Love and 
righteousness seem to be the two principal sup- 
porters of the religion of our Lord. Love is 
the feminine supporter and righteousness the 
masculine. It can easily be seen that love comes 
first, and underlies and sustains the masculine 
righteousness. It is the fulfilling of the law be- 
cause it holds in solution all the virtues. Love 
attaches its possessor to a person, and everywhere 
we find that it is the leader rather than the 
cause which he represents that women love and 
follow. 

The person of Christ and the cult of Mary 
(in the Roman Catholic Church) attract the 
feminine mind and heart far more than the ec- 
clesiastical organization. It is hard to find 
among women — especially of the better sort — 
an avowed agnostic or an unbeliever, while men 
of unbelieving mind are far from uncommon. 
Women are naturally conservative, afi'ectionate, 
and religious. They are more stable than men, 
and have greater endurance. They hold fast 
the faith in which they were born and educated 
long after men have learned to doubt, or have 
wholly abandoned their early belief. 

Women are by nature exceedingly religious. 



WOMAN'S WORLD 25 

But strange it is that they are so, especially in 
Christian Europe and America. Everywhere they 
make much of religion, but, apart from the wor- 
ship of Mary, the religion of our modern world 
has made very little of them. Under old pagan 
faiths women had many and serious disabilities, 
yet never under such faiths were they actually 
accursed. No sooner was the Christian religion 
planted upon our earth than from every bending 
bough of a rising asceticism hung the evil fruit 
of contempt for womanhood. Of course this 
was, though under the name of Christianity, 
still pagan; for among the Romans a woman 
was, first of all, the property of her father, 
and later she was that of her husband ; she was 
man's plaything or his slave, but never his com- 
panion and equal. 

It was asceticism in the early church, rather 
than the church itself, that blighted woman's 
life. It was a great wrong. It added to the 
pagan contempt the monk's dread of moral con- 
tagion. Of course it was at variance with the 
teachings of Jesus; it was grafted upon those 
teachings, and in time it came to be regarded 
as an actual part of them. Thus was the sim- 
ple Gospel perverted to the degradation of 
womanhood. The Mother of our Saviour was 



26 A FREE LANCE 

exalted to a celestial throne, and so removed 
far above all the daughters of Eve who were 
partakers of the ancient curse. TertuUian was 
a Christian father who did much to shape the 
early thought of the church; but consider for 
a moment the opinion of women which that great 
teacher entertained, and which he expressed in 
a direct address to them: — 

"Know you not, each of you, that you are 
sprung from Mother Eve? Against you God 
has registered his righteous sentence. You are 
the gateway to forbidden fruit. You are the 
breaker of righteous law. You persuaded Adam 
that the Devil could not harm him, and so with- 
out difficulty you destroyed the image of the 
Creator in man whom he had created. What 
came of your work but death? It was because 
of your sin that the Son of God must die." 

Thus it became sin for the priest of God to 
mate with a woman. To see her was evil. 
There were monks who thought that even the 
shadow of a daughter of Eve would render 
them unclean. Celibacy became a rule of the 
Church. The only amendment a daughter of 
Eve could make was religious virginity, which, 
it was believed, introduced her into the family 
of Mary, the everlasting Virgin Mother. 



WOMAN'S WORLD 2*7 

I wonder much that women are so religious. 
Their religious nature must go very deep to 
stand the strain of such dishonor and repres- 
sion. This state of things Was of priestly con- 
ceiving, and not of Divine appointment. Our 
Saviour honored womanhood and exalted the 
marriage relation. His view of sexual life was 
in all its essential features the reverse of the 
ideal set up by ecclesiastical authorities. 
Wedded love, and not virginity, was the Divine 
model of perfection in the relation of the sexes. 

By virtue of her idealizing tendency woman 
creates for herself, first of all, a world of mar- 
velous beauty, and then for man as well she 
brings into existence a haven of peace and glad- 
ness. All the hard experiences in life she or- 
naments and adorns. She includes man in the 
circle of her idealization. This explains the 
many strange marriages that take place. 
Women think they are marrying men they know 
and understand, when in reality they are wed- 
ding the creatures of their imagination. 

Men also thus deceive themselves, but not so 
often as do women. Narcissus, fatigued with 
hunting, heated and thirsty, stooped down to 
drink from a clear fountain. The classic story 
records that he saw his own image in the water 



28 A FREE LANCE 

and took it for a beautiful water-spirit living 
in the fountain. He gazed upon the lovely 
image of himself thinking it another being, and 
so fell in love with himself. He pined away and 
died, the victim of a mistaken self-love. 

More often the water-spirit falls in love with 
Narcissus. It is the woman who does the ideal- 
izing. But one way or the other, the idealizing 
takes place, and few marriages are made with 
open vision. The men women marry and the 
men they think they marry are not often the 
same. Love plays fantastic tricks, and women 
are unconscious artists. No doubt in time the 
cruel years will destroy the illusion. The vision 
will fade into repulsive reality. Still there has 
been for a season a gladness it is more than 
likely the reality could never have afforded. 
After all, no world, whether of joy or of sorrow, 
has for us, as has been already said, any other 
existence than that which we ourselves give it. 
It is as the poet tells us: 

"All is but as it seems, — 
The round, green earth. 
With river and glen; 
The din and mirth 
Of busy, busy men; 



WOMAN'S WORLD ^9 

The world's great fever. 

Throbbing forever; 

The creed of the sage. 

The hope of the age. 

All things we cherish. 

All things that live and all that perish. 

These are but inner dreams." 

We discourse of reality, of a final criterion 
of truth, of things as they are, and of much 
more of the same kind, but of these things, if 
they exist, we have no knowledge. The discus- 
sion of the fundamental and substantial may en- 
tertain philosophers, but for all practical pur- 
poses such discussion can have neither use nor 
meaning. Every man is his own Adam, and 
every woman is her own Eve. The story of cre- 
ation starts over again in every cradle and ends 
in every new-made grave. 

An American writer said long ago: "If we 
discover the connection of our thoughts and feel- 
ings with outward nature, the whole universe is 
in our power; and we may, by a modification of 
ourselves, change the world from its present 
state into what we all wish it might become." 
In other words, to quote from Goethe, "Each 
one sees what he carries in his heart." 



30 A FREE LANCE 

We make our own universe, and people it as 
we will. But what does it all matter? Comes 
it not to the same thing in the end, whether man 
is dependent upon an outward universe, or 
whether that universe is dependent upon the in- 
dividual soul? To Emerson the two proposi- 
tions are the same. "Whether," wrote the Sage 
of Concord, "nature enjoys a substantial exist- 
ence without, or is only in the apocalypse of the 
mind, it is alike useful and alike venerable to 
me. Be it what it may, it is ideal to me so 
long as I cannot try the accuracy of my senses." 
There the matter ends. For us the universe is, 
view it as we rajay, ideal. It is what we make it. 
So Coleridge thought when he wrote the famil- 
iar lines: — 

"Oh, lady, we receive but what we give. 
And in our life alone doth nature live." 

Women, light of heart, paint in the gay colors 
of their cheerful and hopeful souls. They are 
born optimists, living near the surface, if not 
actually upon it. Men, too easily depressed, 
create for themselves a universe wherein the dog- 
star reigns. It is a universe in drab. The 
masculine temperament is resolute but not hope- 



WOMAN'S WORLD 31 

ful. Men sink their analysis to the inmost core 
of things. They themselves dwell deep down 
below the surface where the sunlight does not 
always penetrate. 

It is generally known that there is a richer 
flow of arterial blood in the posterior region of 
a woman's brain, while in the case of man the 
flow is richer in the anterior section. The func- 
tions of the posterior are mainly sensory and 
are concerned in seeing and hearing, while the 
anterior includes the speech centres. The 
higher inhibitory centres are concerned with the 
will, and there is an association of centres con- 
cerned with the appetites. There is a corre- 
spondence between the richer blood-supply of the 
posterior brain and woman's delicate powers of 
sensuous perception, rapidity of thought, and 
emotional sensibility. Correspondingly, men 
have greater originality, calmer judgment, and 
stronger will. 

It has been observed that women are nearer 
the infantile type, while men approach the se- 
nile ; hence women remain normal in thought, feel- 
ing, and conduct, while men have a variational 
tendency toward genius, insanity, and idiocy. 
The nearest point of approach to genius that 
women reach is found, so it seems to me, in novel- 



32 A FREE LANCE 

writing. In the last generation they were ex- 
ceptionally good letter-writers and conversa- 
tionalists. They are now good, but not great, 
actors. But there were some very great actors, 
like Rachel, Siddons, Ristori, and Charlotte 
Cushman, among them in previous genera- 
tions. 

There has been much discussion with regard 
to the sex of the angels. The Scriptures and 
the Church seem to make them masculine. 
These are some of the names applied to them 
in the Sacred Writings, and it will be seen that 
they are of either masculine or neuter gender. 

1. Gods (Elohim, "Worship Him all ye 
gods"). 

2. Sons of God (Job xxxiii: 7). 

3. Seraphim ("Burning Ones"). 

4. Cherubim (Plural of Cherub: "Fulness of 
Knowledge." — Perhaps from the Chaldee for a 
Young Man). 

6. Watcher (Dan. iv: 13). 

6. Thrones (Col. i: 13). 

7. Dominions ("Lordships," Col. i: 16). 

8. Principalities (Col. i: 16). 

9. Powers (Col. i: 16). 

10. Morning Stars (Job xxxviii: 7). 

11. Living Creatures (Ezek. i: 6-11). 



WOMAN'S WORLD 33 

12. Beasts (The Greek is better rendered 
"Vital Beings": Rev. iv: 6-8). 

13. Gabriel (Dan. viii: 14). 

14. Michael ("Who is like unto God?" Dan. 
x: 13; Jude 9, Rev. xii: 7. Michael is called 
the Archangel), 

In the Apocrypha we have Raphael (Tobit 
iii: 17; xii: 15), and Uriel or Jeremiel. There 
are also evil angels. 

These names, each and all of them, suit or fit 
men rather than women. But the artists could 
not rest satisfied with a celestial hierarchy wholly 
male. There seemed something unnatural in 
painting upon these masculine figures iridescent 
wings, aureoles, and much more of the kind. 
Fra Angelico di Fiesole depicted angels as 
women, and the friar never suspected that he 
was guilty of heresy. For centuries, all over 
the Christian world, art has represented the 
angels as female. It was "Sancta" rather than 
"Sanctus." Why is it the great painters have 
wished, after all that we gather from Scripture 
and the Church, to make their angels feminine? 
Most of the world-renowned artists who set the 
artistic fashion for us all are men, and they 
very naturally think of bright and beautiful 
angels who come and go on errands of mercy 



34. A FREE LANCE 

as celestial women. The angels are painted in 
flowing robes. How else could they be por-. 
trayed.? Think of arraying them in male cos- 
tume! How would an angel appear in a frock 
coat or in evening dress.? Of course one might 
arrange an antique classic style of dress, but 
how much more natural to use such drapery as 
would be appropriate upon a woman's form! 
The wings suggest aspiration, the desire for 
higher and better things. The German poet 
tells us 

"The eternal womanly 
Draws us upward and onward." 

It is the mission of these celestial risitants to 
draw us upward. They belong not so much to 
the earth as to the heavens. They are above 
us, and we paint them in the upper air. They 
go between God and man, and connect us with 
heavenly glory. The great artists have always 
felt that when they were painting angelic beings 
they were depicting the essentially feminine. 
The delicate limbs, the gentle and refined fea- 
tures, the eye bright with hope and love, and a 
feeling of purity — all these are suggestive of 
the feminine side of human nature. An ath- 



WOMAN'S WORLD 85 

letic angel would seem to be an incongruity. 
The creature would be out of the order of na- 
ture. Even the fighting angels who combat the 
Prince of Darkness are represented as vanquish- 
ing the Adversary not so much through phys- 
ical strength as by spiritual qualities. These 
divine combatants are made to be masculine out 
of a sense of propriety. Otherwise the drawn 
sword would be out of place. There is no real 
belligerency about them, no vindictiveness, and 
no anxiety with regard to the result. The 
fighting angel has a face full of aspiration and 
hope, full of an uplifting peace. 

Someone has asked, "Do women love brutal 
men?" I believe they do. There is a force in 
brutality that pleases and even fascinates some 
women. Women like power. Nothing so dis- 
gusts a woman as an effeminate man, and noth- 
ing is more repulsive to a normal man than mas- 
culinity in a woman. I think that in the minds 
of most men the chief objection to the woman's 
rights movement grows out of a fear that the 
movement will defeminize women. The fear may 
be groundless, but it is operative nevertheless. 
My own belief in the matter is that the en- 
franchisement of women will have a beneficial in- 
fluence upon our political life for about twenty- 



36 A FREE LANCE 

five or thirty years ; after which time politics 
will do for women what it has already done for 
men. Women will bring new blood to our po- 
litical system, and we shall have for a while 
more honesty and greater faithfulness in the dis- 
charge of public duties. But by and by the de- 
moralizing struggle for place and power will 
corrupt the wife as it has already corrupted the 
husband. Wait until we have a female boss, a 
thing as unseemly to us as is the masculine angel 
to the Fra Angelico school of painters, and then 
tell me what you think of the political equality 
of the sexes. 

But still I believe that women are entitled to 
the same political rights that men enjoy. It 
will do them little good morally, and much 
harm, to wade in political filth, but men claim 
the right to wade in that kind of material and 
they seem to enjoy it. Women have the same 
inherent right to choose their own way in both 
public and private life that men have. The 
boss is a very dirty creature, but he is not un- 
popular with church members and with other 
good people. These may denounce him, but 
nevertheless they will vote for him. He may be 
himself a church member. It would not be 
strange were he an elder or a deacon. Still, the 



WOMAN'S WORLD 37 

boss Is a disgrace to any political system. The 
filth of political life will soil women as it has 
soiled men, but so long as we have political 
rights and popular suffrage some one must lie 
in the gutter. The gutter is malodorous, but 
hundreds of men scramble for the place, and 
they seem to be afraid that women will get it 
away from them. 

Women are fond of power, and when they be- 
come the political equals of men they will, be- 
yond all question, grasp at it, and make full use 
of it. There is no reason to think they will 
make worse use of it than have men. If I am 
right, they will at first make much better use of 
it. Women have had comparatively little direct 
power; all their power has been indirect, but it 
has been, for the most part, well used. They 
have had charge of the social and domestic forces 
of the world, and they have made them tell for 
good. Without woman's presence home would 
be impossible. Church-work and many benevo- 
lent enterprises are wholly theirs. 

Women are more chaste than men, but they 
have fewer temptations, less violent passions, 
and more to fear from the consequences of 
wrongdoing. They are less liable to be intem- 
perate and brutal, but they have more vanity 



38 A FREE LANCE 

and jealousy; these they do not always exhibit 
to the world, because they have tact to a degree 
seldom within the knowledge and practice of 
men. Women are more merciful, but men have 
a better sense of impartial justice. Women are 
sympathetic and compassionate, but they lack 
the force and energy of their brothers and hus- 
bands. 

Woman's world, beautiful in many ways, is 
always intense, but never is it wide like the mas- 
culine world. Women see the things that concern 
themselves, while men, with larger vision, inter- 
est themselves in the race to which they belong. 
I much doubt, in truth, that a woman could be- 
come a statesman (I suppose the word should 
be "stateswoman"). She might with no great 
difficulty take up the work of a politician, but 
the mind of a true statesman calls for a much 
larger outlook. 

Women may vote, hold office, and do the things 
men do, but only when they learn to live as men 
live can they know what it is to lead a free life. 
So long as they are upon their knees before the 
milliner and the dressmaker; so long as they are 
\mable to travel ten miles without a large trunk 
well packed; so long as they must ride horse- 
back with both feet on the same side of the 
horse; so long as they must wear their hats, 



PERSONALITY 39 

which they describe as "creations," indoors— 
that is to say, in the theatre, in the church, and 
at functions of various kinds; so long as they 
must dress only as the latest fashion requires — 
so long they must remain the slaves they have 
always been. Man's freedom is not a thing 
apart from his life; the two are inseparable. 
Far back in the early colonial days in this coun- 
try the cobbler of Agawam wrote of women, "It 
is no marvel they wear drailes on the hinder 
part of their heads, having nothing, as it seems, 
in the fore part but a few squirrel's brains to 
help them frisk from one fashion to another." 
The only possible escape from the "squirrel's 
brains" is now, as it always was and always 
will be, through the open door of personal inde- 
pendence. Voting may help, but it will not 
change the narrow life of woman into the larger 
one of her husband. 

PERSONALITY 

T7MERS0N wrote in his Journal: "I know 
"■— ^ not why, but I hate to be asked to preach 
here in Concord." He preached much in Con- 
cord and in towns near by during the summer of 
1856. I had the same feeling, and I have it 
now. After I gave up my charge in Great Bar- 



40 A FREE LANCE 

rington I did not like to preach in the neighbor- 
hood. It seemed to me that my personality, 
with which the people were familiar, came be- 
tween the congregation and the message. The 
speaker, to speak well, must lose sight of him- 
self. But how can one lose sight of a person- 
ality of which one knows that every man, woman 
and child in the room is intensely conscious? 



THE SHADOW 

T^THEN in his own bosom man enthrones 
' " the dream and neglects the reality; 
when he exalts the idea and forgets the prior 
and superior claim of the deed, thus preferring 
the shadow to the substance; when he has made 
this final and supreme choice of the unreal, put- 
ting aside life itself for the passing emotions 
engendered by life, then has his doom been pro- 
nounced. Then is his service forever ended. 

FREEDOM IN MARRIED LIFE 

"XTO two persons can live together without 
■^ ^ some surrender of personal freedom upon 
both sides. In married life the surrender is 
absolutely essential; and where love is present, 



FREEDOM IN MARRIED LIFE 41 

and is wise as well as tender, the surrender may 
cost but little, and brings true and lasting hap- 
piness. But there is always a limit, and in no 
two persons is it in precisely the same place. 
To some men, as to some women, that independ- 
ence of thought, feeling, and action which we 
call personal liberty is more essential than it is 
to others. But somewhere the line must be 
drawn beyond which lies peril, if not actual dis- 
aster. The secret of happiness in the married 
life consists in knowing just where the line 
should be drawn, and in respecting its require- 
ments. 

Most women have what we call the maternal 
instinct; in some it is strong, and in others 
weak, but few are wholly without it. Where 
there are children, the instinct finds its own 
natural expression in all those tender endear- 
ments and noble self-sacrifices which render 
motherhood the divinely beautiful thing men 
have always believed it to be. But often (oftener 
now than in earlier days) marriage is not 
fruitful, and the maternal instinct, deprived of 
its natural outlet, usurps in some measure the 
place sacred to conjugal afi^ection. With a love 
not wholly wifely but in part maternal, the 
woman encroaches upon the personal freedom 



42 A FREE LANCE 

and manly independence of her husband. She 
has in one both husband and child. If it so hap- 
pens that she is the older of the two, this en- 
croachment becomes more decided, and, it may 
be, more harmful. 

Woman's life is more sheltered than that of 
man. Her associations are, in most cases, more 
religious. She has a life in church activities 
which no man, unless he be a clergyman, can 
understand. Her emotional nature is more sen- 
sitive, and plays a larger part in her otherwise 
more circumscribed and intense life. She has 
comparatively little of man's free out-door life, 
and, as a natural result, she knows little of the 
self-reliance that comes with such a life. Of 
man's struggle in the world for place and power 
she has often not even the faintest conception. 
She has grown up, if she is well placed socially, 
in her father's home, surrounded by comfort and 
luxury. She knows nothing of club-life, for the 
so-called club of the modern woman is no club 
at all in the man's understanding of the word. 
She would hardly recognize either the flavor or 
the scent of liquor. She never in all her life 
smoked a cigar. She is unacquainted with the 
interests and exigencies of a political career. 



FREEDOM IN MARRIED LIFE 43 

Her life is in most of its salient features the 
opposite of man's life. Most women come to 
the marriage altar personally pure — ^wholly so 
in body, and comparatively so in mind. Few 
young unmarried men have led an irreproacha- 
ble life. Upon the altar of woman's heart the 
flame of married love burns with a steady, clear 
light, but often with less ardor than could be 
desired. The man's love may sometimes flicker; 
it is not always free from the suggestion of 
smoke and even ashes, but it is a living fire. 

Now, with all these diff^erences, it is apparent 
that some degree of freedom is called for and is 
essential. The woman who would force her hus- 
band to live her life, and not his, is doing a 
great wrong. She may become a domestic ty- 
rant. Few men would wish their wives to think, 
feel, and live the masculine life — it would dis- 
tress them to believe that their wives could so 
live. If there is one thing, as has been else- 
where said, that a man dislikes and dreads more 
than anything else, it is a masculine woman. It 
comes then to this, — that the two lives united in 
the marriage estate are never one to the extent 
of self-extermination. Self may pass from 
sight, — it should so pass, — ^but, nevertheless, it 



44 A FREE LANCE 

remains, and is the enduring foundation of a 
united life and love that finds in glad surrender 
the largest freedom. 

POPULAR SUFFRAGE 

"I3OPULAR suffrage means an enormous num- 
"*• ber of votes cast for one man. The av- 
erage man disfranchises himself, and the "boss" 
elects himself and his political friends to what- 
ever oj9ices he and they covet. In the end a re- 
public is likely to become only the irresponsible 
government of a few self-elected men, who rule 
because the common people are indifferent. The 
common people being what they are, shrewd 
politicians are not likely to encounter much dif- 
ficidty in thinking and voting for them. 

AN INTERESTING EXHIBIT 
OF INJUSTICE 

TN the United States of America the personal 
character and standing of the citizen are 
of so little value, and the sense of justice and 
"fair play" is so feebly developed, that an inno- 
cent man who has been mistakenly convicted of 
a crime he did not commit, is, upon the discov- 
ery of new evidence establishing his innocence, 



AN INTERESTING EXHIBIT 45 

simply pardoned, just as any genuine rascal 
might be pardoned if for any cause it seemed to 
the Governor best that he should be allowed to 
go free. The State has unjustly deprived a 
man of liberty, has associated him with crim- 
inals, has blackened his name, has injured his 
social and business standing and has thus im- 
paired his ability to earn an honest living; and 
it may be that the State has also confiscated 
what little property he possessed by compelling 
him to use it in his own defence: — all this the 
State has done, and yet, upon the discovery of 
new and exonerating evidence, it makes no rep- 
aration. It simply opens the door, and says, 
"Begone!" That is the kind of justice under- 
stood and practiced in the land of the Stars 
and Stripes. 

Two thousand years ago the keeper of a 
prison said to the Apostle Paul, "The magis- 
trates have sent to let you go; now therefore 
depart and go in peace." But Paul replied, 
"They have beaten us openly, uncondemned, 
being Romans, and have cast us into prison ; and 
now do they thrust us out privily? nay verily, 
let them come themselves and fetch us out." 
Paul was an innocent man, and he refused to ac- 
cept a pardon that left him guilty in the eye 



46 A FREE LANCE 

of the law. He resented that kind of a pardon, 
and demanded exoneration. He might also, had 
he been so inclined, have insisted upon repara- 
tion. Paul was a Roman, and he demanded 
Roman justice. Had he been an American, he 
would, doubtless, have thrown up the sponge. 
It would hardly have been worth his time and 
strength to insist upon anything resembling 
justice. 

Quite in keeping with Paul's indignant re- 
fusal to accept the place of a guilty man, when 
he was not only an innocent but an injured one, 
was the refusal of George Fox, the founder of 
the Society of Friends, commonly called Quak- 
ers, to accept pardon for crimes of which he 
was not guilty. When great effort had been 
made to secure his liberation because his health 
had become seriously impaired by reason of the 
hardships attending his imprisonment, the judge 
ostentatiously offered him a pardon. This he 
spurned in words that remind us of Paul, but 
that do not even remotely suggest our American 
citizenship. These are his words, extracted 
from his Journal: "A pardon was not agree- 
able with the innocence of my cause. I had 
rather have lain in prison all my days than come 
out in a way dishonorable to truth." 



AN INTERESTING EXHIBIT 47 

It was humiliating beyond expression to read, 
as I did in the Medical Record in this year of 
grace 1910, that a reputable physician who had 
been sent in 1905 to the penitentiary in Iowa on 
a twelve years' sentence, for a murder he did 
not commit, was pardoned by the Governor 
without apology or reparation of any kind. 
For five years the State had taken his labor in 
the penitentiary, and rendered him no compen- 
sation. During all that time he had been the 
unwilling companion of evil men. His medical 
practice and professional standing had been de- 
stroyed. His home had been broken up and his 
family humiliated. All these outrages had been 
heaped upon him, and then at last it was discov- 
ered that he was an innocent man. Was any 
effort made to repair the damage, or to save the 
reputation of the man for the benefit of his 
family.? No, the man was not evenly publicly 
exonerated. Had he been hanged, new evidence 
would have been of no service. He would in 
that case have gone down to posterity as a con- 
victed murderer, and the State that hanged him 
would have made no attempt to repair the wrong 
by saving his reputation for the benefit of his 
family. 

Andrew Toth served nearly twenty years in a 



48 A FREE LANCE 

Western penitentiary for a murder he never 
committed. When the man's innocence was dis- 
covered, he was at once pardoned by the Gov- 
ernor, and, homeless and penniless, he was' 
pushed out into the hard world to shift for himr 
self. Destitute, enfeebled by age, unused to lib- 
erty and self-support, with most of his friends 
no longer living, he found himself unable to meet 
the demands of free life out in the world among 
men. He returned to the penitentiary and 
begged to be readmitted to the prison, which was 
the only home of which he had any knowledge. 

It was suggested that the State set aside for 
Andrew Toth the sum of ten thousand dollars, 
as a compensation for the ruin of his life through 
the miscarriage of justice. It was, however, 
shown that a bill calling for that or any other 
amount to be devoted to the purpose named 
would be unconstitutional. The State can send 
innocent men and women to prison, but it can- 
not spend a single dollar by way of compensa- 
tion. Yet when one considers the rapidity with 
which a number of "public servants," who for 
one reason or another do not go to prison, ac- 
quire wealth, it does seem that the State they 
"serve" might make some reparation for a great 
wrong. 



AN INTERESTING EXHIBIT 49 

Compare in this matter the conduct of the 
United States of America with that of New 
Zealand. Mr. John Meikle was, in 1887, ar- 
rested on a charge of sheep-stealing. He was 
convicted in the Supreme Court, and sentenced 
to a long term of imprisonment. After he had 
spent five years in prison, it was discovered that 
he was entirely innocent of the crime charged 
against him. The case was brought before the 
New Zealand Legislature, and Mr. Meikle was 
offered a pardon and a grant of twenty-five 
thousand dollars. Mr. Meikle at once refused 
the "free pardon" which left him in the eye of 
the law a guilty man; he maintained that if he 
had not committed a crime there could be noth- 
ing to "pardon." He insisted upon a reversal 
of the judgment of the Supreme Court. The 
result was that an act was passed "to reverse 
the conviction of John Meikle on the charge of 
sheep-stealing, and to offer him the sum of 
twenty-five thousand dollars as compensation for 
injuries received." Of course our "wild and 
woolly Republic," in which Tom, Dick, and 
Harry are, all of them, influential citizens, 
might learn from almost any nation some im- 
portant lessons in common morals ; but it is 
humiliating to see New Zealand, with its civili- 



50 A FREE LANCE 

zation of yesterday, so far in advance of our 
own land in the simplest elements of common 
justice. 

John Henry Chance of Boston was another 
victim of false imprisonment, who, upon the es- 
tablishment of his innocence, was pardoned. 
He had served a long time in prison, and his life 
had been ruined, and yet no compensation of any 
kind was attempted. One of the worst cases 
on record was that of a negro, Jim Henry, who 
in 1909 was convicted in a Florida court of as- 
sault with intent to commit murder. After his 
conviction he had been leased by the State to the 
Florida Pine Company and to another company, 
and for both corporate masters he had served as 
a common slave, with the added stigma of a 
crime he did not commit. A small monetary re- 
muneration (about four hundred dollars) was 
made, but in his case, as in all the others, a par- 
don was granted that left him in the eye of the 
law still a criminal. 

An interesting exhibit of injustice was fur- 
nished in December, 1911, to the people of the 
State of New York, and, incidentally, to the citi- 
zens of the entire country, in the discovery of an 
innocent man serving a life sentence in Sing 
Sing Prison. Mr. John Boehman had been in 



"YE OLDE BOOKE MAN" 51 

the prison sixteen years, for a crime committeii 
by some other person. The necessary testimony 
was supplied by two men who had remained 
silent at a time when Boehman needed their dep- 
ositions to prove an alibi. The men stated 
that they were afraid of being hounded by the 
police. Had they died at any time during the six- 
teen years of Boehman's imprisonment, the knowl- 
edge of his innocence must have perished with 
them. In that case, no doubt, an innocent man 
would have been placed beyond all hope of mercy. 
In Boehman's case, as in the other cases cited, 
the mass of injustice was supplemented by fur- 
ther wrongdoing. The man was thrust out into 
the world with no exoneration. He was par- 
doned for a crime he did not commit. He was 
offered no compensation. The State did not even 
think of returning to the misused man the money 
he had earned for it during his imprisonment; 
for he had worked for the State during all those 
bitter sixteen years. And the two men who 
withheld their testimony in the hour of Boeh- 
man's need went unpunished. 



"YE OLDE BOOKE MAN" 



M 



Y good friend, Joseph McDonough, "Ye 
Olde Booke Man," is a hale and hearty 



52 A FREE LANCE 

Irishman, honest as the day is long, and as 
sharp at a bargain as any man can very well 
be in a world like this, where every kind of busi- 
ness, trade, enterprise, and even profession, is 
"war to the bitter end." He will not cheat you, 
nor will he prevaricate, but there are excellent 
reasons for believing that he will come out on 
top when you "rush in where angels fear to 
tread," and put your book-knowledge against his. 
He knows more about books than you do unless 
you are an exceptional man, and he has the same 
right to use his wits that you have to use yours. 
I should advise you to spike his gun in advance 
by asking him for his opinion of the book which 
you want and which he would be glad to sell. 
If the little book on the table before you is not 
a first edition, he will tell you that it is not. 
Should he not know (a most unheard-of thing) 
where or when the book was first printed, it may 
be he would roll up his eyes and look wise "above 
what is written," but you may be very sure he 
would say frankly, "I don't know." 

But the chance of his not knowing is poor, for 
he has given all his life to the purchase and sale 
of old books, and he knows them not only as 
things, but as friends to be loved and cherished. 
He has, hidden away on one of the back shelves, 



«YE OLDE BOOKE MAN" 53 

certain books that tell him all there is to be 
known about editions, prices, and pretty much 
everything else that a bookseller must know. 
To sell one's friends does not seem ta be just 
the right thing, but that is precisely what every 
trader in books must do. 

Books are friends and companions, and some- 
times they even seem to be living creatures that 
actually put their arms about their readers. It 
is really a very tender love, more gentle and 
persuasive than one finds it easy to resist. By- 
ron fattened a goose for his Christmas dinner, 
feeding it every day from his own hand. The 
result was just what might have been expected. 
When the Christmas time came around he had 
become so attached to his web-footed friend that 
he could not bring himself to consent to its death. 
I have known traders in old books to refuse to 
sell certain choice volumes that they had cata- 
logued and offered to the public at remunerative 
prices. There is a Dutch story of a dealer at 
The Hague who assaulted his customer when he 
saw him removing from the shop a book that he 
had purchased and that was, therefore, his own. 
The dealer had consented to the sale, but he had 
not counted upon the removal. 

Booksellers are generally quiet and peaceable 



54 A FREE LANCE 

men, though Carey fought a duel with Colonel 
Oswald and was badly wounded, and the young 
Boston bookseller Henry Knox became the fierce 
and belligerent General Knox of our American 
Revolution. The Dutch dealer who struck one of 
his best customers was more irascible than war- 
like. He conducted a large business at The 
Hague, and was respected by all who had deal- 
ings with him. He had simply repeated By- 
ron's experience with the goose, becoming so at- 
tached to a favorite volume that the mere 
thought of taking leave of it stirred up every 
element of bitterness in his nature.. 

I said that Mr. McDonough was an Irish- 
man. He was born in Kilkenny, and if that 
does not make him Irish from top to toe I 
should like to know just what on all the surface 
of this beautiful earth will make a man a true 
son of the Emerald Isle. 

Two very distinguished cats were also born 
in Kilkenny, but, quite unlike "Ye Olde Booke 
Man," they were of an exceedingly belligerent 
disposition. The story is that they fought so 
ferociously that each swallowed the other, leav- 
ing only the tails behind. I have known the 
good book man a number of happy years, and 
never yet have I seen any marked resemblance 



"YE OLDE BOOKE MAN" 55 

between him and the aforesaid felines. It is 
true that all three, the "Olde Booke Man" and 
the two lively cats, came from the same town, 
and it is also true that they are all Irish, but 
beyond these interesting circumstances I know 
of nothing whatever that connects in any way 
their several biographies. 

Mr. McDonough's father was Irish before 
him, and so it is with him a matter not simply 
of the soil, but of blood and bone and of the 
soul itself. He has the kindly nature and keen 
wit for which the Irish are so justly celebrated. 
I never knew a more friendly, warm-hearted, 
and jovial man, but in one thing he is not, I 
think, like the ordinary Irishman, for I have ob- 
served in him a faint but distinct tendency in 
the direction of mental depression. Like all the 
rest of us, he has seen trouble, and it may be 
that advancing age and trouble are responsible 
for the depression. Never was there a better 
companion. I have passed some very happy 
hours in "Ye Olde Booke Man's" shop, in an 
easy chair, with a fragrant "Romeo and Juliet," 
and no end of rare old books that one might 
look for elsewhere many a year and not find. 
Such a place, full of strange bargains, and 
choice and curious books from all parts of the 



56 A FREE LANCE 

world, must be a joy to the heart of the lover 
of books, whoever and whatever he may be. 
With books on every side (cobwebs, dust and all 
the other concomitants of good reading being 
present to season the intellectual feast) in the 
old book-shop. Father Time lays aside his pic- 
turesque scythe and tucks away his hour-glass 
in the ample robes that enfold his somewhat 
emaciated anatomy. After a while he slips 
away, and there is in the old shop no more re- 
membrance of the hours. You read, read, and 
read, and almost before you know it, you dis- 
cover that the cashier is making change for you, 
and you awaken to the fact that you have made 
a purchase. 

Everything happens so quietly and gently in 
the old book-shop that you wonder if there is 
not something in the mere presence of books 
that men have overlooked. You somehow feel 
that what little is said between leaf and leaf is 
sacred. The Romans hung in the banqueting 
room directly over the table a beautiful rose 
to remind the guests that the conversation at 
the table must not be repeated on the morrow 
or at any other time, but must be sacredly pre- 
served as an inviolable secret. To every guest 
"suh rosa" meant concealment and silence. 



«YE OLDE BOOKE MAN" 57 

White was the color of the rose, because it was 
a white rose that Cupid dedicated to Harpocra- 
tes, the god of silence. 

In the dear old book-shop you will see over 
the long rows of tempting volumes no white 
flower suggesting silence, but you will see what 
is just as good as, and to the book-lover much 
better than, the rose of silence : you will see the no 
less sacred and dust-white cobweb. In capa- 
cious wine-vaults the cobwebs gather over the 
musty corks of old and well-seasoned bottles, 
and the critical judge will pick out no new vint- 
age, but, stretching his arm and thrusting his 
hand into some dark corner, he will bring to 
view a mass of dust and cobwebs. He knows 
what he wants, and he wants the very best. In 
that mass of dust he holds the finest wine in 
the cellar. 

In McDonough's shop you will do well to 
brush aside the dust, for under it all one may 
sometimes find the richest wine of letters. Take 
the sliding steps (you find such in every large 
book-shop) and mount to the top shelf. The 
best books are not supposed to be there, but 
one can never know just what he will find; no 
doubt you may come upon some vin ordinaire or 
some new vintage, but you may find as well the 



58 A FREE LANCE 

very life-blood of the mellowest grape in all the 
vast vineyard of letters. 

The mellow grape of golden song, 
How rich the life-blood in its veins; 

Happy his hours, his life how long. 
Who the glad wine of letters drains. 

In a certain sense all men die equally well off 
in this world's goods, for all leave behind them 
whatever the world contains. King and pauper 
leave, both of them, all there is to be left. It 
is true that the one can bequeath to his immedi- 
ate family what the other has no power to dis- 
pose of, but they both leave to the world at 
large all they ever received from it and vastly 
more. In a very important sense I own all 
there is to be owned. The great libraries in 
every land belong to me in so far as I am able to 
use them. It is so also with the great book- 
shops, and with all the rare and valuable books 
that crowd their shelves. It may be "Ye Olde 
Booke Man" does not know it, but I own his 
shop and whatever it contains. 

And yet I must respect his prior ownership, 
which is not less real though very different. Use 
confers ownership of its kind. Because I take 



«YE OLDE BOOKE MAN" 59 

delight in the arts and letters, they are mine. 
Yes, they are mine forever; that is to say, so 
long as I live and retain my reason. I wonder 
men who give themselves up to books do not 
oftener lose reason. The charm and fascination 
of books and of book-collecting are very great. 

I have a beautiful copy of Charles Nodier's 
"Bibliomaniac," translated into lovely English 
by Mrs. Mabel Osgood Wright, and published 
by her husband in 1894. It has forty-five illus- 
trations from designs by Maurice Leloir, en- 
graved on wood by Noel. It is the story of a 
man who went mad over books. He was a most 
amiable lunatic, and everybody loved him, save 
some drunken thugs who knocked him down in 
the street because they saw at a glance that he 
was a much better man than they, any of them, 
could ever hope to become, and because he did 
not join them in a rude and vulgar shout for 
Poland. From the assault he was in bed three 
months, and during all that time he had the cov- 
erlet over him strewn with book-catalogues. 

What delightful reading good catalogues are ! 
I find them much more attractive and in some 
ways more instructive than the thousands of 
wishy-washy newspapers that concern them- 
selves and disgust their readers with worthless 






IDET. ^: 



"Wljen T sir 3a^ gpa 



_ 1 _ ^ ' T r»est CODT of 

- -i^sTK. !EriT i-~ ~tt£ 






than I r^-T i-iL . r _:l-- -i :_^ 



'-TE OLDE BOOKE MAN" 61 




vko aat mfy raid bat 

Mil H wded hj tibe OBsfc md gonB nt ss oln 

bodb-sfaop, csperienee m akm 

pabe to penal the iirji^iiM of 

A ccrUa leader coafesed to ae tibat ke had 

^gfignred aeienl ivlaBKs !■ a boK-flMip aad 

one in a pdbfic flbnuy. Bat, as he was a 

of frnmafcrahle ti'lfUiiij, ifae bodks 

fae^ g ie atly daaaged. Had tibe 

plam Mr. Jones, &e le^er of tihe 

JQst ofCT tike wa J, or Mr. ShSIi, tibe 

I sianld lia^ ^m^ 

tioB (MmO, if of ao odber Usd) to lay 

books be bad cottaiaity aot Mfiiwiid 

Wbaf s ia a oaae? Mvb, a^ 
rcrj, Tery madi. Tbe Maa iriio caa wiSbe W3- 
liam Taft oa tiie faohl n^vtcr aiQ aot fare 
preda^ as tie aaa abo acrUles Fefer Saift 
or Taaolbj Brava anst fare. Aastii^s poebj 
is poor ****** gfr (tiaM^^ ^J^ sade vone fwiiKs), 
as all tile "^^gfi^-^**— ^^"g ircr.i kr.-s rilj 
too adL A ■iliiiisii wrfter c -:?:-£ ^i_zi li 
"a fonnfist, a naa of ilotiies zi - - . 
idhncs aad rilnak, aad baboc- i;r-_-r ^s 
aad ai^bt-gima posaigs;* bat ~ z:i~- z:- 
foigottea tiuit Mr. A:i5tiz - - 
reaiei" oier aZI ire —155 :: -;::_ ii :: .j: ^e 



62 A FREE LANCE 

has given the world. What are those two little 
words "poet laureate" worth to the man who 
can write them after his name? Ah, my good 
reader, they are worth many golden pounds that 
better poets find themselves unable to command. 

I do confess that I once yielded, in "Ye Olde 
Booke Man's" shop, to an urgent desire to set 
a certain author right upon one of his own mar- 
gins. Conscience-stricken, I returned to the old 
shop fully determined to retouch the page, or, 
failing in that, to make myself owner of the 
book. I did not get the book, for it was sold 
to some careless reader who never stopped to ex- 
amine his purchase. No one would now remove 
from the walls of an old prison in France cer- 
tain inscriptions cut into them with a knife or 
traced upon them with a pencil. Not all who 
left upon those walls their bid for remembrance 
were men of distinction, but time and circum- 
stances have rendered the lines they left well 
worth the preserving. Time and place can do 
many things that men alone find themselves un- 
able to accomplish. 

I once purchased from McDonough a book I 
did not want. I bought it because I had writ- 
ten within it what I thought might not please 
him, though what I had written I might have 



«YE OLDE BOOKE MAN" 63 

penciled in a book that belonged to me. It may 
be the verses scribbled that fine winter afternoon, 
with the fragrant smoke of a good cigar enfold- 
ing me the while, would not be wholly out of 
place here, but I shall, on second thought, put 
them aside, substituting this rhyme of the old 
book-shop : 

"ye OLDE BOOKE MAN" 

A trader in the brains of men 
Is "Ye Olde Booke Man" sure; 

What songs and stories line his shelves, — 
Some great and some obscure. 

The poets come to him for sale. 

And plain prose-writers, too; 
In dainty volumes of levant. 

Or bound in gold and blue. 

I wish I was an ancient book. 

On Joe McDonough's shelf; 
I'd like to see what he would ask 

For my plain-featured self. 

I'll bet he'd sell me for a song. 

Or for a single note, 
If that fine note called for ten pounds, 

With pay-day not remote. 



64 A FREE LANCE 

Ten pounds I ten pounds! Great Scott, how mach! 

(I should Great Joseph! say) 
Perhaps he'd tear my book-plate out. 

And throw the rest away. 

We authors are but books, I trow. 

Some good and others poor; 
Our leaves and bindings fall apart, 

Xot one shall long endure. 

We lire awhile in other minds, 

Or in McDonough's shop; 
Then Time brings down his glitt'ring scythe. 

And from the shelves we drop. 

CHEAP AND XASTY 

/^HEAP and nasty" is a phrase that de- 
^-^ scribes people who, ashamed of their 
humble birth, lie about their ancestors ; who, 
ashamed of work, are still not ashamed to live 
upon the industry of others ; and who, anxious 
about the curls that sprout from their skulls, 
care nothing that their skulls are empty of any- 
thing worth caring about. 

BLAKE'S ^^SION OF ANGELS 

"13 LAKE'S first vision is said to have been when 
■*-^ he was eight or ten years old; it was the 
vision of a tree filled with angels. Mrs. Blake, 



EVERY MAN HIS OWN JAILER 65 

however, used to say : *You know, dear, the first 
time you saw God was when you were four years 
old, and He put His head to the window and 
set you screaming !' " — Gilchrist's Life of Blake, 

Blake was an engraver and poet, and a tree 
full of angels would be to him what a tree full 
of apples would be to my friend, the good farmer 
who lives across the road. He saw along 
the line of his own tastes and inclinations, and he 
took his most congenial conceit for a manifes- 
tation of Divine Power. In this he was not un- 
like the theological and ecclesiastical romancers 
of our day, who are so familiar with God that 
they are no longer filled with wonder or surprise 
when they contemplate His glory. These pass 
with the multitude for wise and saintly souls, 
and to their preaching gather expectant congre- 
gations that meekly receive chaff for grain, 
and that, being invited, strive to drink the wine 
of life from an empty cup. 

EVERY MAN HIS OWN JAILER 

Li^VERY man is his own jailer. He goes to 
"*— ^ prison to himself. He is under lock and 
key, and cannot get beyond the limitations of 



66 A FREE LANCE 

his own nature. We discourse in glowing terms 
of a liberty we do not possess, and the while we 
boast of freedom we are chained fast to our 
conceits and prejudices. 



ANTHONY TYRRELL 

JANUARY 15, 1895.— Day dark and rainy, 
^ but study-fire brighter than usual, and full 
of gay salamanders. The evening hours es- 
pecially delightful in company with a new ac- 
quaintance in smooth olive morocco: "The Re- 
cantations as they were severallie pronounced 
by William Tedder and Anthony Tyrrell, 
(sometime two Seminarie Priests of the English 
Colledge in Rome) ... at Paules Crosse; 
with an Epistle dedicatorie unto her Maiestie, 
and their severall Prefaces unto the Reader, 
contayning the causes that mooved them to the 
same: 1588." I have seen one other copy of 
the book in the British Museum, but mine is 
larger, and I think the impression is more dis- 
tinct. It cost me twenty dollars^ — too much 
by five dollars, as I have learned from a London 
catalogue. 

What a choice rascal was the old Wisbech 
exorcist, Anthony Tyrrell; and with what su- 



ANTHONY TYRRELL 67 

perb genius and fecundity of imagination did he 
lie about Mary Queen of Scots ! That man had 
as many religions as a cat has lives, and, like 
that animal, he had the comfortable trick of com- 
ing down upon his feet. In this very recanta- 
tion he admits to "having twice before renounced 
the Pope." A dime museum advertised among 
its curiosities a man from New Zealand with an 
elastic skin; Tyrrell had an elastic conscience, 
and no doubt he could have turned himself into 
a Turk or a wild man of the jungle on a mo- 
ment's warning. "Neatness and Despatch" 
was the motto of his religious life, and his phi- 
losophy, like that of the Vicar of Bray, was 
comprehended in the four lines: 

So the bait be good I can recant. 

Believe in less or more. 
For the boat must tack 

when strong winds blow. 
Or never reach the shore. 

An old and worldly-minded sinner of long 
ago wrote thus : "Be not over quick to speak 
thine opinion, nor too obstinate in maintaining 
it, but let all thy words be seasoned with pru- 
dence. Such an opinion is neither one thing 
nor another, but doth change itself many times ; 
why shouldst thou bring thy neck to the halter 



68 A FREE LANCE 

for a mere nothing? Thou canst believe and 
doubt much without great clamor. If thy neigh- 
bor compel thee to his opinion, vex not thyself 
with contentions, but go merrily with him in 
outward matters. A pinch of incense to the 
gods will matter Httle, since the Lord looketh 
on the heart; and thy judgment shall be accord- 
ing to the inward desire." 

DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

WHAT a correct and beautiful picture of 
the growth and development of a noble 
spiritual life is given us by Confucius in the 
following statement: 

1. "At fifteen, I had my mind bent on learn- 

ing." 

2. "At thirty, I stood firm." 

3. "At forty, I had no doubts." 

4. "At fifty, I knew the decrees of heaven." 

5. "At sixty, my ear was an obedient organ 

for the reception of truth." 

6. "At seventy, I could follow what my heart 

desired, without transgressing what was 
right." Legge's Translation. 

The early search for truth gives rise to con- 
viction; conviction clears spiritual vision, and 



RELIGIOUS NATUKE 69 

dispels those overhanging mists of doubt which 
render decision of character and firmness of pur- 
pose and action impossible; a clear spiritual 
vision kads to the discernment of truth; that 
discernment opens the heart for its reception; 
and the reception introduces such harmony into 
man's entire nature that he may safely trust 
himself to choose and do the right under all 
circumstances and at aU times. 

It is not difficult to Christianize the above or- 
der of spiritual growth thus : — 

(1) I sought truth, (2) and found it in 
Christ. (3) Under its influence doubt and mis- 
giving disappeared, (4) and growth in grace 
followed. (5) Growth in grace gave rise to 
spiritual experience, (6) and that in turn, 
slowly crystallized into holy habit and uncon- 
scious obedience. 



RELIGIOUS NATURE 

A MONG many deeply religious people, and 
•*^*- especially among such of them as reside in 
little villages and places remote from the great 
centres of intellectual activity, there prevails a 
deep-seated fear that not only the church, but 
religion itself, may be in danger from the ad- 



TO A FREE LANCE 

vance of modern thought and the discoveries 
of modern science. And even in large cities, 
where the mental horizon is more extended, there 
are some who share the same painful apprehen- 
sion. For the comfort of all such, of whatever 
name or creed, I call attention to a few facts, the 
consideration of which should be helpful and re- 
assuring. 

I. Religion is an essential element in man's 
nature, and as such can be destroyed only by 
the destruction of human nature itself. Man 
is, in every land and age, a religious animal. 
He shares his physical nature with the wild 
creatures of the forest and the beasts of the 
stall; and with them he shares as well in some 
measure his intellectual life. The dog can think 
and reason in its way as correctly as does its 
master in his. It is even possible that some 
dogs may reason better about some things than 
some masters, for the dog understands dog life 
from the canine point of view, and to that kind 
of understanding no other creature can attain. 
The one thing that distinguishes man from beast 
is not intellect, though differences even here are 
vast. Man and dog are both of them intellectual 
beings. The distinguishing factor in man, and 



RELIGIOUS NATURE 71 

the one that everywhere appears at all times 
and under all circumstances, is the spiritual na- 
ture which he shares with no other creature upon 
the face of the earth. So long as he continues 
to possess the spiritual nature he must remain a 
religious animal. Man and dog, both of them 
think, but only man can worship. 

Man is what he is by virtue of this spiritual 
nature from which he can never escape, and 
which no scientific discoveries can ever destroy. 
His religion may be of one kind or another, he 
may worship grotesque idols or the only true and 
living God, but the one thing that everywhere 
distinguishes him as a man and separates him 
from every other animal is his recognition of 
God. Even those who repudiate everything 
connected with what we commonly call religion, 
still, in one way or another, perhaps without 
their knowledge of the fact, entertain some meas- 
ure of religious feeling, and it may be of re- 
ligious hope. Thomas Paine and Robert G. In- 
gersoll were not Christians. They rejected the 
Gospel as we understand it, but they were in 
their own way religious men. Both of them 
thought much and discoursed much upon reli- 
gious themes. Even the avowed atheist who de- 
nies the existence of God has a spiritual nature 



72 A FREE LANCE 

which he is powerless to destroy. Could a man 
destroy his spiritual nature, he would be no 
longer a man, for there would remain nothing 
to distinguish him from the beasts of the field. 

Ever at the heart of doubt is the sweet con- 
solation which springs from the assurance that 
spiritual things can be questioned only by a 
spiritual nature. The birds that build nests 
over the chamber window and sing their song 
of gladness in the early morning, never, so far 
as can be discovered, doubt concerning the great 
questions that allure and torment the human 
mind. Robin and wren never inquire into their 
own origin and destiny. They have no qualms 
of conscience. They remember little of the past, 
and anticipate less of the future. 

Man is troubled about spiritual problems be- 
cause he has a spiritual nature. He could not 
doubt the existence of his soul had he not a soul 
with which to entertain that doubt. He could 
not question the existence of God were he not 
made in God's image. That image is spiritual, 
and by virtue of it he is able to deal with 
spiritual things. Every "doctrine of grace" 
may be doubted. Man may "if" the universe. 
Birds and animals can doubt nothing in the 
psychological world, since spiritual things have 



RELIGIOUS NATURE 73 

no existence for them. They have no spiritual 
nature. Our ability to question should give us 
confidence, for our uncertainty may be converted 
into a stepping-stone to larger faith. Reli- 
gious doubts are still religious. They introduce 
into life, not less speculation, but a wider hori- 
zon. It is always possible to follow Tennyson's 
wise advice: 

"Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubtj 
And cling to faith beyond the forms of faith." 

The "sunnier side of doubt" is never far re- 
moved from a sweet assurance; and "faith be- 
yond the forms of faith" is in reality what we 
so often mistake for doubt. 

II. Religion and man's religious opinions are 
not the same thing. Religion is an essential 
element in man's nature, and is, therefore, inde- 
structible, while all our opinions and convictions 
change. A Buddhist may become a Christian, 
but the change may not make him either more 
or less religious. He had religious opinions be- 
fore he became a Christian, and after his con- 
version he still has religious opinions, only they 
are different from those he entertained prior 



74 A FREE LANCE 

to his acceptance of the Gospel. His religious 
nature underwent no change, but the character 
of his convictions underwent a very great 
change. We should be careful not to confuse 
religion with any peculiar theory of religion. 
Theology is one thing and faith another. A 
man may have very slight acquaintance with the 
various systems of theology, and yet he may have 
personal acquaintance with God in Christ as his 
Father and his Saviour. 

III. Religion is not dogma. Mere subscrip- 
tion to the tenets of this or that religious de- 
nomination does not make a man more or less 
religious. Of course it is right that a man 
should unite with whatever church he may find 
himself in agreement with, but religion is some- 
thing more than church membership. There are 
good men in every religious organization, but it 
is not the organization that makes them good; 
it is something much greater and more substan- 
tial. A man might unite with fifty churches 
and be a bad man, and he might remain separate 
from all religious denominations and yet be not 
only a deeply religious man but a Christian man 
as well. Church membership may be a duty, 
but it does not change character. Few men 



RELIGIOUS NATURE 75 

comprehend the doctrinal standards of the 
churches with which they are connected, and it 
is not necessary that they should understand 
them. To be a Christian is not to be a religious 
philosopher, but a sincere and affectionate dis- 
ciple of Jesus Christ. 

Let no timid soul fear the advance of modem 
science. Nothing can destroy religion as such 
because nothing can destroy man's religious na- 
ture. Our opinions should change and will 
change with new light ; and we should be willing 
to change them when larger knowledge renders 
such change necessary. The man who values 
his long-cherished opinions more than known 
truth is certainly not more religious than his 
neighbors, but he is less of a man for his moral 
cowardice and for his want of faith in God. 
We shall never all of us think alike, but that 
should not discourage us. With faith in God, 
service of Christ, and toil of heart and hand 
for our fellow men, we may make religion a 
practical thing, and life all that God would 
have it to be. 

I have from time to time jotted down in my 
note-book such definitions of religion as came 
under my observation. These are very differ- 



76 A FREE LANCE 

ent, one from another, and yet it is quite possible 
to trace in them all the single thread that gives 
them a common relationship. 

Definitions 

Heligion is the knowledge of God and His will, 
and of our duties toward Him. — john henry new- 
man. 

Religion is the play of the Infinite on the finite 
in the moral realm. — lyman abbott. 

Religion is conduct touched by emotion.^ — Mat- 
thew ARNOLD. 

Religion is emotion touched by mortality. — 

GEORGE M. beard. 

Religion consists in the perception of the Infinite 
under such manifestations as are able to influence 
the moral character of man. — max muller. 

Religion is a feeling of the supernatural and of 
our relations to it. — george m. beard. 

Religion is the recognition of our duties as Di- 
vine Commands, — kant. 

Religion is thought about the Higher than self 
worked through the emotions into the acts of daily 
life. — barnett. 

Religion is the infinite nature of duty.^ — mill. 

Religion is the immediate feeling of dependence 

of man on God. — schleiermacher. 

1 Elsewhere Matthew Arnold defines religion as 
"Ethics heightened, enkindled, lit up by feeling." 



RELIGIOUS NATURE 77 

Religion is awe in the presence of the majesty 
of an inscrutable power in the universe. — Herbert 

SPENCER. 

Religion is the relation of man to God. — schafp. 
Religion is the consciousness of universal rela- 
tion. ^DAVID A. WASSON. 

Religion is a feeling towards a supernatural Pres- 
ence manifesting itself in truth, goodness, and 
beauty. — c. c. everett. 

Religion is the worship of Supreme Mind and 
Will, directing the universe and holding moral rela- 
tions with human life. — james martineau. 

Religion is the upward flight of the soul to what 
it believes to be Divine. — J. a. MaccuLLocH. 

What is religion if we may not describe it as 
deep calling unto deep? It is the deep in man re- 
sponding to the infinitely greater deep in God. — 

PERCY MARTIN. 

Religion standeth not in wearing of a monk's 
cowl, but in righteousness, justice and well doing. 

LATIMER. 

Religion is the communion between a worship- 
ping subject and a worshipped object — the com- 
munion of a man with what he believes to be a 

God. FAITHS OF THE WORLD. 

Religion is the recognition of God as an object 
of worship, love, and obedience. — anonymous. 

Religion is the life of God in the soul of man. — 
anonymous. 



78 A FREE LANCE 

Religion is the sense of unity with the Infinite 

Whole. ANONYMOUS. 

GOD IN NATURE 

TO see God in flowers, the grass, the trees; 
to hear Him in the song of birds, and in 
the music of wind and wave ; to commune with 
Him in the silence and darkness of night — thus 
to hold fellowship with the Eternal is something 
beyond the power of language to describe. AU 
things are full of God to the soul that has 
learned to love Him. 

TUNING THE PULPITS 

QUEEN ELIZABETH said: "I tune my 
pulpits." The pulpits of the Established 
Church played in Elizabeth's day the tune that 
pleased her best. They were all tuned to suit 
her fancy. Now, as then, the State Church, 
whether in England or elsewhere, is like a music- 
box. Queen, King, Parliament tunes it, winds 
it up, turns the lever, and lo ! the finely adjusted 
pulpits start ofi^ with what tune was given them. 



R 



UNFRIENDLY RELIGION 

ELIGION is not always a source of com- 
fort and peace. There are men to whom 



THE SHARP EDGE OF MERCY 79 

it is never a friend, but only a dim and sheeted 
ghost, haunting a desolate conscience, and work- 
ing an intermittent and spasmodic repentance 
in a still xmregenerate heart. Many a man has 
cried out to Religion from the depths of his 
heart: "Hast thou come to torment me before 
my time?" Only when faith turns to love, and 
life derives from it an altered color, has Re- 
ligion a renewing power. 

THE SHARP EDGE OF MERCY 

T IKE a benediction from Heaven, and as 
"*~^ a gentle prayer from the tender heart of 
a mother, glides the surgeon's knife around the 
ugly tumor. A skillfiil physician wrapped his 
sharp scalpel in a soft and yielding sponge, 
and, while he stroked the felon, lanced it. How 
often we are lanced while we are stroked ! The 
velvet hand of Providence hurts in order to 
cure. The most compassionate mercy has the 
sharpest edge. 

"HE TAUGHT THEM" 

rriHE wonderful Sermon on the Mount is pre- 
■*• faced by "He opened His mouth." The 



80 A FREE LANCE 

trouble with too many preachers is that they do 
not open their mouths. They make a noise 
without m,aking an impression. Having read 
that *'He opened His mouth," we are not sur- 
prised to learn from the next sentence that "He 
taught them." 



THEOLOGY AND PHYSICAL CONDITION 

TOHN CALVIN had indigestion; Queen Mary 
^ of England had dropsy and uterine disor- 
der ; John Knox must have had some trouble with 
his liver; nearly all of the men and women who 
found the severity of God, as applied to their 
neighbors, quite restful, seem to have had some 
extenuating disease. I wonder what distemper 
our old friend Baxter had. Our theology seems 
to take color from our physical condition. 



THE NATIONAL CHURCH AND PARLIAMENT 

rriHAT the Saviour is the head of the Kirk 
■■■ of Scotland, in any temporal, judicial, 
or legislative sense, is a position which I can dig- 
nify by no other name than absurdity. Par- 
liament is the temporal head of the Church, from' 
whose acts, and from whose acts alone, it exists 



CHURCH AND PAKLIAMENT 81 

as the national church, and from which alone it 
derives all its powers." — Lord President Hope. 

So we are to understand that in every state 
church (the Presbyterian Church in Scotland, 
the Episcopal Church in England, the Lutheran 
Church in Germany, the Roman Catholic Church 
in Spain) there are two heads having equal au- 
thority, but controlling different departments — 
the Saviour and the Civil Government. Neither 
of these may trench upon the other's territory. 
Parliament can never allow the Saviour to inter- 
fere with the "temporal, judicial, or legislative" 
interests of the church, for these are in the 
keeping of Parliament. On the other hand, the 
Saviour cannot permit Parliament to interfere 
with the spiritual affairs of the church because 
these are His field of operation. If the word 
"blasphemy" has any meaning whatever, it 
seems to the writer of this paragraph that the 
hateful word must surely apply to the language 
of Lord President Hope. 

The National Church, according to Hope, 
owes its existence not to the Saviour but to Par- 
liament; it derives also its powers from Parlia- 
ment. Such being the case, it must be bound to 
serve and please Parliament first of all, and to 



82 A FREE LANCE 

serve and please the Saviour later, when such 
service may be possible. Why should it not also 
address its prayers to Parliament? 

Why not mark off the "Acts of Parliament" 
into chapters and verses, and have them bound 
into the same volume with the "Acts of the 
Apostles," for public reading in the Sunday 
service, since both "acts" are of equal author- 
ity? 

The National Church must hold and teach 
such doctrines as Parliament permits. That is 
to say, though the Saviour established the faith, 
the National Church may not embrace it unless 
it has received the endorsement of Parliament. 



A FAITH THAT CANNOT BE SUNG 

"jV /TEN no longer sing the "Dies irae, dies ilia." 
"^ ■*■ The hymn is still in our hymnals, but in 
these days we do not sing it. A faith that 
cannot be sung is not a faith to believe. 



ECCLESIASTICAL PROFANITY 

rriHE sin of blasphemy is by no means coii- 

fined to the irreligious and openly vicious. 

An Anglican clergyman said: "The Holy 



INSTITUTIONS 83 

Communion, administered by a man not ordained 
by a bishop, is no more spiritually effective than 
a marriage ceremony performed by an actor in 
a play is legally binding." That is to say, 
the Lord's Supper derives its spiritual value not 
from the consecrating presence of the Master 
but from the endorsement, which it receives or 
may receive from a certain sect of believers 
known in this country as "The Protestant 
Episcopal Church." Could profane audacity go 
further,? I know the name of the man whose 
wicked words have been quoted, but I will in all 
charity treat him as the sons of Noah treated 
their father when through drunkenness he had 
made an indecent exposure of his person. They 
walked backward that they might not see his 
shame, and so they covered him from sight with 
a mantle. I also will, because of the sacred of- 
fice which he fills, hide, so far as I may, this 
ecclesiastic's name. Let it not be remembered. 



INSTITUTIONS 

TNSTITUTIONS never reason; never attempt 
to justify themselves ; seldom make any seri- 
ous effort to improve themselves ; they stand and 
crumble. If the church is an institution only, it 



84 A FREE LANCE 

too must crumble. The only future such a 
church can hope for must be one of dust and 
ashes. 

THE MARRIAGE OF CUPID AND PSYCHE 

/^^NE of the most remarkable of Tryphon's 
^-^ gems engraved on sardonyx represents 
"The Marriage of Cupid and Psyche." The 
thinness of the veil through which the features 
of the happy ones are discerned with great 
clearness is a most difficult eflPect to produce in 
stone. Wedgewood reproduced the gem, and 
made all collectors familiar with its exquisite 
beauty. The subject is one for the restricted 
dimensions of a gem. It gives us so much of the 
nuptial procession as could be displayed upon a 
surface nearly an inch and three-quarters in 
length. The figures are well spaced, with no 
suggestion of crowding. They seem to be just 
arriving at the banquet where all the gods wait 
to do them honor. 

It was only when Psyche was truly married to 
Cupid that it was given them both to know the 
sweet delight of parental duty. Their first 
child was Pleasure. It was only at such a wed- 
ding that the Heavenly Ones could minister. 
A splendid banquet was spread. Mercury hfted 



RIVALRY 85 

the sparkling goblet of nectar, and pressed it to 
the lips of Psyche. All that was mortal passed 
away. "Drink," said Mercury, "and never 
know death." Ganymede held the cup to Jove, 
and Bacchus served the rest of the Divine Be- 
ings. The Hours bedecked themselves with 
roses, and the Graces scattered perfumes until 
all the air was faint with ravishment. The 
Muses sang such songs of gladness that Apollo 
snatched his harp and accompanied them. 
Satyrus played the flute while Venus danced. 
The air was rent with shouts of praise while 
Paniscus recited heavenly verses. And so were 
united the Pure Mind and Glowing Passion. 

RIVALRY 

TN the northern part of the Empire State is 
■■■ a little village which, with a population of 
but three thousand souls, can boast of twelve 
physicians and a "horse doctor." The interest- 
ing thing in connection with this generous sup- 
ply of medical skill is the inability of these 
learned gentlemen to say, any one of them, a 
good word for a neighbor-practitioner. I am 
informed by a witty fellow who amuses himself 
with the foibles of mankind that each physician 



86 A FREE LANCE 

has confidently given his medical rival just one 
year in which to practice, after which brief sea- 
son it is openly predicted he will quit the place 
a wiser if not a better man, and seek "pastures 
new." For a score of years the prediction has 
been annually renewed, and yet all these disciples 
of Esculapius are still on the ground and in good 
fighting condition. When I was last in the vil- 
lage, less than a month ago, I inquired of the 
senior combatant, as to who of all the "frater- 
nity" had met with the largest success, and was 
informed that the much-to-be-envied individual 
was the "horse doctor." 



TRUE BEAUTY ASTONISHES 

/'^F a certain very beautiful woman I heard 
^-^ a man say: "I do not love her — ^I could 
not love her ; and yet when I meet her I am con- 
scious of a shock as from an electric battery." 
Those words reminded me of the saying of Ba- 
con: "There is no exquisite beauty without 
some strangeness in the proportion." The 
longer I think upon it, the more clearly it ap- 
pears that there is something in the highest de- 
velopment of beauty that not only charms but 
astonishes. Indeed it is doubtful if true beauty 



A BUTTONLESS PHILOSOPHER 87 

ever exists apart from some degree of sur- 
prise. 

A BUTTONLESS PHILOSOPHER 

J THINK Cobbett described himself when he 
■*■ called the Quakers "unbaptized buttonless 
rogues." I know not if he were baptized with 
water, but he seems to have had little grace; 
and in his later years his clothes were none too 
well cared for. Perhaps he possessed two shirts, 
which would be one more than Diogenes is said 
to have owned when he resided in his famous 
tub; and he may have had upon his trousers no 
more patches than that same philosopher dis- 
played upon his shabby cloak; but both men 
belonged to the same "buttonless" crowd, to 
which the Quakers did not belong. 

THE GENTLEMAN 



fTlHE gentleman by his personality alone at- 

-■■ tracts or repels. Yoi 
to him than he will permit. 



-■■ tracts or repels. You can come no nearer 



MANNERS 



THE cultivation of manners is self-culture at 
its best, for bearing, deportment, and even 



88 A FREE LANCE 

appearance are a revelation of character. 
Great importance attaches to a soldier's phy- 
sique. The step is scarcely less important than 
the manual of arms. The soldier's physical 
presence determines in no small measure his 
moral structure and his worth as a fighter. Sol- 
dierly deportment will beget soldierly virtues. 
Manners give power to a superior mind. They 
equip the mind and insure it victory. Thus 
with weapons neither rude nor aggressive the 
field is won. 



A LITERARY RESEMBLANCE 

TN one way, and in one way only, John Ruskin 
■*• and Walt Whitman resemble each other ; both 
crowd an entire poem into a title. Some of 
Ruskin's books are, "The Ethics of the Dust," 
"The Seven Lamps of Architecture," and "The 
Stones of Venice." Could names be more po- 
etic? Walt Whitman calls some of his poems, 
"From Noon to Starry Night," "Whispers of 
Heavenly Death," "Proud Music of the Storm," 
"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," 
and "A Song of the Rolling Earth." If only 
Whitman's poems were as poetic as their names 
are beautiful, what marvelous music we should 



NO LONG POEM 89 

have in the "Leaves of Grass." In names only 
the two writers approach each other. Of course 
apart from these the two have neither resem- 
blance nor sympathy. 



NO LONG POEM 

T INCLINE to Poe's opinion that there is no 
•*■ such thing as a long poem. Song is self- 
limited in its nature. The best singer can sing 
but a little while. To me the long poems we so 
admire are only successions of shorter ones 
strung upon a single thread. It is not always 
easy to separate these, but the separation can be 
effected where there is the requisite skill and 
patience. When one comes to lines which show 
a flagging of interest, and are labored and dull, 
it is more than likely he has come upon con- 
nective tissues uniting the smaller poems. Be 
this theory of verse right or wrong, still the soul 
of all true poetry is song. 

A TRUE STANDARD 

HENRY I made the length of his own arm 
the standard measure throughout England. 
President Roosevelt strove to make his own fool- 



90 A FREE LANCE 

ish whims and humiliating conceits the measure 
of his country's rights and privileges. Henry's 
yard was of real service to his age and king- 
dom, but of what possible use could the bluster 
and farrago of our Am,erican madcap be to a 
nation ashamed of his selfish exploits and tur- 
bulent demagogism? 

PENANCE 

T N New England there are many old women of 
■*• various societies for reforming the world who 
see precisely what should be done, and who go 
about day and night striving to induce others 
to do it. They are like some women of an 
earlier time who, when their consciences reproved 
them for their many sins, returned home from 
the preaching that had awakened them, to make 
their servants do vigorous penance. 

STYLE 

TN these days much is said about literary style, 
"*■ and we are advised to read this author or 
that in order that we may acquire something of 
the excellent style of which he is master. But a 
good style is a very simple thing, not to be ob- 



SENECA'S PILOT 91 

tained by great mental exertion. Swift covered 
the ground when he defined a good style as noth- 
ing more than "proper words in proper places." 
The man who says clearly and in a forcible way 
precisely what he wants to say is a good styl- 
ist; and he may be safely followed, so far as 
the following of any man is possible. There is 
no "trick of style." Nothing is good that is 
not straightforward. That composition is the 
best which most perfectly fits the word to the 
place. 

SENECA'S PILOT 

TT was Seneca's Pilot who said, "0 Neptune, 
"■■ you may save me if you will; you may sink 
me if you will; but whatever happens, I shall 
keep my rudder true." That is the best thing 
any one can say on land or sea, for on both 
one is a pilot. The author of "Adam Bede" has 
the same thought: "For my part, I think it's 
better to see when your perpendicular's true 
than to see a ghost." Duty may be, in any 
given case, difficult to determine, but the pur- 
pose to do it is always simple and direct. Never 
in all the world is a ghost so worth seeing as is 



92 A FREE LANCE 

the straight line of duty chosen first of all, and 
well done so far as in the doer lies the deed. 



THE SENSE OF SOUND IN LITERATURE 

XTOT even Shakespeare's "garden of words" 
•^ ^ in Richard II, to use a phrase from Pater, 
gives me so great a delight as I at once receive 
from the sense of sound in noble composition. 
Goethe thought that the eye rather than the ear 
was the organ through which one might most 
completely seize and enjoy the right word. But 
to me music is the essential element in all worthy 
composition. I would hear in every line the tri- 
umphant shout, and the no less tender pleading 
of a mighty chorus of singing words — flute, viol, 
dulcimer, and all soul-stirring instruments 
changed as by magic into living, breathing words. 
Only the poet can give us these, and we enjoy 
them only by so much of the poet as we have 
within our own souls. 



GENIUS 

'HAT genius sometimes takes the place of 
hard work may be seen by a glance at the 



GENIUS 93 

life and at the novels of Lever. He wrote all 
his books at a dash, and at such odd moments 
as he could command. He never troubled him- 
self to examine proof-sheets. Any of his books 
might have been printed upside-down for any 
care he had about the matter. So soon as the 
manuscript was out of his hands, he dismissed it 
from his thoughts. He even forgot the names 
of his books, and could not tell whether he had 
or had not written a book brought to his atten- 
tion. His life was a mixture of pretty much 
everything: he was a doctor, a novelist, the ed- 
itor of a paper, a gamester, and the driver of a 
four-in-hand. He had charge of an emigrant 
ship, lived for a time with the Indians in Canada, 
was a fugitive from his creditors, and kept open 
house for everybody. He was happy-go-lucky 
from cradle to grave. Nothing but genius — 
clear, unqualified, indisputable genius — pulled 
him through. But would not his novels have 
been better had he given himself to study? No, 
I do not believe that Lever would have given us 
a single book had he lived a more orderly life. 
Anything like a definite plan would have spoiled 
his work. Critics used to call his work ephem- 
eral; they said that another generation would 
forget that he ever lived ; that his reputation was 



94 A FREE LANCE 

a bubble, and that it would soon burst. The 
critics were men of well-regulated lives, who 
knew all there was to be known about every- 
thing. But they were mistaken in their esti- 
mate of Lever. They could not understand his 
life, nor yet could they make very much of his 
work. They were analytical men, men of method 
and of form and classification. They loved es- 
tablished rules and conventionalities. No doubt 
they rose every morning at the same hour, and 
went to bed every evening at ten o'clock. What 
could they see that was good in the wild, 
free life of Lever? Well, they are dead, 
and the world remembers them not; but the 
Irish novelist was a man of genius, and he will 
live. 

DISCERNMENT OF BEAUTY 

TT is evidence of fine artistic temperament and 
■*• training that one can see beauty where others 
see no beauty at all. In the same way, it is evi- 
dence of fine spiritual qualities and ethical train- 
ing that one can see moral beauty and lovely 
qualities of heart and mind in a man's life, where 
others behold only the dull and unattractive level 



THE FIVE BEST POEMS 95 

of the commonplace, or even, it may be, the ugli- 
ness of a moral desert. 



THE FIVE BEST POEMS IN THE ENGLISH 
LANGUAGE 

XTO two persons, were they called upon to 
•^^ name the five best poems in the English 
language, would make precisely the same selec- 
tion. Shelley has given us some of the finest 
verses in our language, but, being limited to the 
narrow compass of five metrical compositions, I 
should not select any of that poet's work. Mil- 
ton's poems are among the very best, but our 
age has grown away from him, and, great as he 
is, he fails of providing us the satisfaction derived 
from the reading of some of the humbler lines 
of poets not so well known. I should select 
the following poems, and in the order given 
below : 



1. Hamlet — Shakespeare. 

2. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage — byron. 

3. Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard 

GRAY, 



96 A FREE LANCE 

4. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner — cole- 

EIDGE. 

5. The Vision of Sir Launfal — lowell. 

A PERFECT TEMPERAMENT 

T I IHAT woman has the most symmetrical, bal- 
■*■ anced, wholesome and perfect temperament 
who, with the sweetness of womanhood, unites 
the strength of manhood; and that man has the 
most complete and rounded temperament who, 
to the strength of manhood, joins the fineness, 
gentleness and sweetness of womanhood. 

CIVILIZATION 



nnHE vast deposit of our civilization is pass- 
■•• ing from the trained aristocracies to the 
untrained masses. What is to be the fate of 
that deposit? No man who loves his race or 
even his own smaller country can wholly free his 
mind from grave apprehension. The sub- 
merged masses are coming to the surface with- 
out any preparation for the new duties that 
await them. The bull in the china-shop re- 
mained a bull, but the shop underwent a most 



CIVILIZATION 97 

disastrous change. Millions of people in the 
lower walks of life are now coming into possession 
of privileges and duties they neither understand 
nor appreciate. Is civilization to go the way of 
the china-shop.? 

II 

The men who traveled on the Titanic believed 
that ship unsinkable, and they believed it even 
when the great vessel was making ready for its 
final plunge. Men are equally sure that our 
present civilization is imperishable, and yet there 
are now on every side ominous signs that should 
awaken in thoughtful minds anxiety if not ac- 
tual alarm. The tap-root of every civilization 
is buried deep in its aristocracies; these are the 
depositories of ancient superiorities. Under the 
leveling processes of Democracy all these are 
rapidly disappearing. What is to take their 
place in this world, receiving and preserving the 
sacred deposit of the ages.'' 

Ill 

Civilizations have passed away, some of them 
leaving to our world treasures in art and letters 
that must always delight the cultivated mind. 
Our present civilization in no essential feature 



98 A FREE LANCE 

differs from those that have preceded it. It is 
disintegrating; and all history shows us that, 
while the process of disintegration may be at 
first, and for a long time, slow, a fearful mo- 
mentum is acquired. The final plunge, alike in 
the Atlantic liner and in the great Ship of State, 
must be sudden. It may be in one case an ice- 
berg that brings about the catastrophe, and in 
the other some extensive strike of workmen, a 
contested election, internal dissension, or the 
treachery of an ambitious man. Unless some 
force can be brought to bear capable of re- 
sisting the downward leveling of Democ- 
racy, the final plunge must be sooner or later 
taken. 

COOPERATION 

"1^ yTHAT we call cooperation is usually noth- 
' " ing but compromise, and compromise 
means the annihilation of personality. I am 
weary of patched-up agreements that destroy 
individual action and purpose. The men who 
have influenced others have acted apart from 
them. The strong swimmer sinks when he is 
seized in a death-grip by the drowning man he 
would save. We help men most when we stand 



JEFFERSON 99 

apart from them ; when we grasp them, and will 
not permit them to grasp us. 

JEFFERSON 

JEFFERSON was always, both by nature and 
by association with men of his way of think- 
ing, a "leader of the reds"; and it is after his 
model rather than after that of Washington 
and Hamilton that our country has shaped its 
political life and development. Jefferson was a 
centre of disturbance both in the council cham- 
ber and in the political life of the day in which 
he lived. His conception of republican simplic- 
ity left out of view every thing like dignity of 
bearing, stateliness, and fine deportment. He 
looked upon these with suspicion. It is to him, 
and not to Washington, that we owe much of 
the rudeness and uncouthness of our present-day 
methods of governing. He could not endure the 
forms and ceremonies of older nations. He even 
pronounced the etiquette and formalities attend- 
ing the first Inauguration of Washington to be 
"not in character with the simplicity of repub- 
lican government." He said that these all sa- 
vored of European courts. 

He was by nature a revolutionist, an agitator, 
and a disturber of old ideas and old ways. He 



100 A FREE LANCE 

called the French Revolution a "beautiful revo- 
lution," and expressed the hope that it would 
"spread all over the earth." He looked for 
much good from the lawlessness of the French, 
even in that evil time when they leveled in the 
dust all established institutions, when they trod 
upon order and religion, and when they repudi- 
ated decency itself. He still hoped, and even 
praised, when one of the most kindly disposed of 
sovereigns was brutally murdered. When the 
massacres were at their height Jefferson wrote a 
friend (Mr. Short) such words as these: — 

"In the struggle which was necessary, many 
guilty persons fell without the forms of trial, 
and, with them, some innocent. These I deplore 
as much as anybody, and shall deplore some of 
them to the day of my death. But I deplore 
them as I should have done had they fallen in 
battle. . . . The liberty of the whole earth 
was depending on the issue of the contest, and 
was ever such a prize won with so little inno- 
cent blood?" Think of it! "The whole earth 
was depending on the issue" of unchecked and 
merciless massacre for the prize of popular lib- 
erty ! In Jefferson's eyes the thousands of mur- 
ders committed in all parts of France were "only 
a little innocent blood." 



OUR NATIONAL EMBLEM 101 

There were among the American patriots of 
1776 some who foresaw the peril of Jefferson's 
views. Washington and Hamilton were not the 
only ones who were awake to the danger. John 
Adams, late in life, reviewing the past, described 
the French Revolution as a monstrosity, and he 
traced it to the effect produced in France by the 
American Revolution. He regretted his own 
early ultra-democratic views, and he did what he 
could to undo some of his work which, in the 
light of a more mature judgment, seemed to him 
incautious if not actually unwise ; but he soothed 
his conscience by saying in a letter to an old 
friend, "I meant well." ^ 

OUR NATIONAL EMBLEM 

/'~\UR American Republic made a grotesque 
^-^ mistake when it chose for its national em- 
blem the Roman eagle. The eagle is venture- 
some, predatory, and warlike, and in no way 
does it denote the peace, business tact, sagacity, 
enterprise, and common sense which are distin- 
guishing features of our Republic. The eagle 
is by consent of all men King of Birds. But 
what have we to do with kings? The only king 
we ever had, we thrust from our shores with 
ijohn Adams's Works, vol. ii, p. 340. 



102 A FREE LANCE 

the not over-civil, and certainly in no wise true 
pronouncement: "All men are born free and 
equal." The eagle is not a suitable bird for 
us. Our national emblem should be, beyond all 
question, the Thanksgiving turkey. A not 
over-patriotic wit, looking over my shoulder, in- 
sists that "for obvious reasons the lordly pea- 
cock is the true and only emblem of our Great 
Western Republic;" but the simple fact that 
the peacock Is "lordly" would seem to be a seri- 
ous disqualification. The unromantic and good- 
natured barnyard fowl might not look so im- 
posing upon our flag and coin as a first-class 
Fourth-of-July Bird of Freedom, but it is, never- 
theless, a more thoroughly American symbol. 
Of course the turkey is native to the soil, as is 
also the eagle, and we cannot forget that a 
very large percentage of the citizens of this re- 
public came to our country from somewhere 
else, and that their children speak with a rich 
and melodious brogue not by any means pecul- 
iarly American. But it is not at all necessary 
that the emblem should fit the thing represented 
too closely. In fact, in this case, it would be 
just as well, I think, that the emblem should 
not remind us too forcibly of that for which it 
stands. 



OUR NATIONAL EMBLEM 103 

Of all days, Thanksgiving Day is the most 
distinctively American ; and of that day the tur- 
key is the one and only possible emblem. Every 
good American enjoys a distinct advantage over 
the inhabitants of other lands. He can eat his 
national bird, and even pick its bones. But the 
very thought of roast eagle with cranberry 
sauce is too absurd to be considered a single 
moment. Not ten thousand eagles could make 
so much as a fraction of a New England 
Thanksgiving dinner. But any decent fowl, 
weighing, say, six or eight pounds (a mere 
charity turkey), might, with little or no diffi- 
culty, and without even so much as a teaspoon- 
ful of cranberry sauce, inaugurate a very re- 
spectable repast. In the window of a taxider- 
mist the eagle would seem much better than 
the turkey; but the Roman bird has absolutely 
no right to a place on our postage-stamps, our 
coins, or our flag. The barnyard fowl, with 
its crop well filled with corn and whatever else 
the crop of a domestic bird is likely to hold, is 
the true emblem of our American Republic. 

It will be conceded that the eagle can be put 
to more romantic uses than any turkey we know 
of could be put to. Other nations have adopted 
the eagle, but, so far as we know, not one nation 



104 A FREE LANCE 

on all the face of the earth has ever chosen the 
turkey. The Emperor Napoleon, delivering the 
colors to his troops, said: "Soldiers ! take again 
the eagles which have so often led our fathers to 
glory." Think for one moment of associating 
turkeys with glory! What effect would it have 
had upon the French troops had the Emperor 
addressed them thus : "Soldiers ! take again the 
barnyard fowls which have so often led our 
fathers to glory"? No doubt they would have 
laughed themselves to death; and perhaps that 
would have been a very good way (as good as 
some other ways) of dying for the French 
colors. 

Americans have stolen a march on Johnnie 
Crapaud, whose Emperor described his flag as 
having led the fathers and Johnnie himself, in 
gilt and fustian, to glory ; but an American, not 
to be outdone by any Frenchman, actually 
named his bunting glory itself. Dr. Thomas 
Dunn English, who should have changed his 
family name to something more patriotic, once 
wrote what he hoped might prove a national 
song, and in time supplant the unsingable "Star- 
Spangled Banner." He wrote these even more 
unsingable lines ; 



OUR NATIONAL EMBLEM 106 

"Though crowns may break and thrones may fall. 
Though changes may the world appall. 
Our banner shall survive them all 

And ever live in story. 
The rainbow of a rescued land, 
Where freemen brave together stand, 
With truth and courage hand in hand. 

Floats proudly here. Old Glory. 

Refrain 
"Old Glory, Old Glory, 
Float proudly here. Old Glory. 
Old Glory! Old Glory! Hurrah for you. Old 
Glory! 

"In days we fought with George the Third, 
When Independence was the word. 
One voice, from rising manhood heard 

As well as old age hoary. 
One purpose then we had in view. 
To form of states a Union true. 
And eyes and hearts were turned to you. 

Our banner, grand Old Glory, 

Refrain 

"Old Glory, Old Glory, 
Our banner, grand Old Glory. 
Old Glory! Old Glory! Hurrah for you. Old 
Glory!" 



106 A FREE LANCE 

The "Old Glory" song, like many another na- 
tional song, is boastful and vainglorious. An 
added calamity was the music to which it was set, 
and which may be truthfully described as gran- 
diose and pretentious. It was later set to better 
music, but it died an early yet natural death. 
Still, Dr. English will be remembered for many 
a year to come because of that one felicitous 
name, "Old Glory," and because of "Ben Bolt." 
He should be remembered also, so I think, be- 
cause of his "Book of Battle Lyrics." The 
word "old," as used by Dr. English, is expres- 
sive of endearment and not of age. Our flag is 
young. The first legislative movement looking 
to the formation of a national flag was made 
June 14, 1777, and resulted in the following 
resolution : — 

"Resolved, That the flag of the thirteen United 
States be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; 
that the Union be thirteen stars^ white, in a blue 
field, representing a new constellation." 

Public proclamation of the flag was made Sep- 
tember 3, 1777; and the "Stars and Stripes" 
floated for the first time over Fort Schuyler, 
located on the site of the present village of 
Rome, Oneida County, New York. Our flag has 



OUR NATIONAL EMBLEM 107 

been changed many times by the addition of new 
stars as new States have been received into the 
Union. Up to February 24, 1866, every flag 
hoisted over our Capitol at Washington had 
been manufactured from English bunting. On 
the day named, the first wholly American flag 
was given to the breeze, waving over the seat of 
our National Government at Washington. 

There is now a tendency in the United States 
(a tendency emphasized by various patriotic so- 
cieties) to fall down and worship the flag, while 
at the same time there is but little corresponding 
wish to render that flag supremely worthy of 
adoring love. One may not advertise his busi- 
ness, be it one of the most honorable in all the 
world, upon either the front or the back of 
"Old Glory;" but he may put, without rebuke, 
that same "Old Glory" to most inglorious uses. 
We are truly a thoughtless, careless people. A 
foreigner was arrested for rubbing dust from 
the floor with a worn and frayed sample of the 
"Stars and Stripes." He was a very ignorant 
man, and had no thought of insulting either the 
nation or its standard. To him a dilapidated 
banner of any country was suitable only for 
scrubbing and mopping uses. He was arrested 
for an unintended insult which it was said he had 



108 A FREE LANCE 

offered the American flag ; but the man who had 
him arrested (no doubt for political effect) was 
permitted to insult the flag every day in the 
year by associating it with all kinds of political 
rottenness. 

An effort is now being made to teach our chil- 
dren to love their country by shaking flags in 
front of them, and by having them sing in the 
public schools "America" and "The Star-Span- 
gled Banner." Only when we illustrate in our 
lives what we would have operative in the lives 
of our children can we look for good citizenship 
in the rising generation. Speech-making, flag- 
waving, and song-singing are well enough in 
their places, but good citizenship cannot be man- 
ufactured by any mechanical contrivance or per- 
functory performance. So long as the children 
in Dur schools see that we mean by the country 
a political party, they will read into the tri-col- 
ored bunting nothing better than party feeling. 

I once heard a distinguished orator declare 
on the public platform that Tammany Hall was 
"an association of patriotic and unselfish Amer- 
ican citizens who were banded together to secure 
to New York City, and incidentally to the State, 
and even to the entire country, good govern- 
ment, and the impartial administration of just 



OUR NATIONAL EMBLEM 109 

and reasonable laws." The statement sand- 
bagged the entire audience. Not a word was 
said. All were silent as the grave. There were 
no sounds of approval, nor were there any of 
disapproval. Three thousand persons sat 
stunned by that statement. But the listeners 
were only stunned and not permanently para- 
lyzed. In a few moments something like ap- 
plause was heard; but before the applause could 
become general, gravity gave way, and the hall 
resounded with uproarious laughter. How many 
flags do you think it would require to instill love 
of country and respect for our institutions into 
the minds of children taught to believe such a 
statement? 

An officious and over-patriotic teacher in a 
school connected with Trinity Chapel in the City 
of New York got it into his head that one of 
the most important of the many important things 
in a well-arranged curriculum is the adoration 
of the American flag. At Trinity Chapel, when 
the children file out at the close of the session, 
all "salute the flag." A little Italian boy 
stalked past the flag with head erect. The head- 
master requested the youth to do the usual obei- 
sance, and received from him only a defiant look. 
The child refused to salute what was to him a 



110 A FREE LANCE 

foreign flag, and at once the master proceeded 
to administer what seemed to him to be just and 
reasonable punishment. A moderate riot re- 
sulted, in which fists and even a few bricks and 
stones were used, but the little fellow did not mock 
with false reverence the symbol of our American 
institutions. It is more than likely the flag lost 
rather than gained by that headmaster's super- 
ficial patriotism. 

The value of the flag lies wholly in what it 
represents. To a Turk the Stars and Stripes 
may mean very little. To an Italian not in 
sympathy with our traditions and institutions, 
it may represent much that is even repellent. 
So long as a stranger observes our laws and con- 
ducts himself in such a way as to awaken no 
animosity or ill-will, we can well afford to ex- 
cuse him from foolish dissimulations with regard 
to our flag and armorial bearings. 

I suppose it is of no great consequence what 
device or emblem is chosen for flag, coin, or es- 
cutcheon. An eagle is as good as a crocodile, 
and a Thanksgiving turkey would be in time as 
sacred in the eyes of an American as is the holy 
dragon to the vision of a native of China. Ger- 
many has a double eagle; England and Persia 
have, each of them, a lion; and Siam rejoices in 



OUR NATIONAL EMBLEM 111 

an elephant. The appropriate turkey, once at 
roost upon our national arms, would, I am sure, 
seem to us quite as sacred as the more highly 
appreciated eagle now appears to be. 

The real flag is not a matter of bunting only, 
nor is it a matter of stars, stripes, eagle, lion, 
dragon, elephant, or aught else. Neither Betsy 
Ross nor any other woman ever was or could be 
the mother of "Old Glory." They have in Phila- 
delphia what they call "The Flag House." It 
is the house in which Betsy Ross once lived, and 
in which she (so it is said) made, at the request 
of Washington, the first flag of the United 
States. The "patriotic landmark," as it was 
called in circulars and on invitations to contrib- 
ute towards its purchase, has been secured by 
the "Betsy Ross Memorial Association;" and 
already it has become the Mecca of patriotic 
pilgrims. But the real building so sacred to 
Americans is not the shabby little wooden struo- 
ture on Arch street in Philadelphia: it is the 
much nobler building that patriotic imagination 
has constructed in the minds and hearts of Amer- 
icans. Imagination makes everything that we 
are and all we have. Red, white, and blue bunt- 
ings count for nothing unless there be observed 
a certain arrangement in colors. We follow 



112 A FREE LANCE 

the pattern, for it is into that we have breathed 
the love, the romance, and the loyalty of our 
hearts. It is the pattern that we have idealized, 
and not the rude material of the bunting. 
Idealization of that pattern gives us the symbol 
we revere. In the same way imagination has 
transformed for us a rapacious and not-over- 
clean bird of prey into a noble and magnificent 
creature grasping in its fierce talons at once the 
olive branch of peace and the sharp arrows of 
war. In some parts of the country the eagle 
is protected by law. It may not be hunted and 
shot as are other birds. Imagination makes the 
fiag, the escutcheon, the symbol, and everything 
else; and what it makes them they are. Image 
or outline in your mind what you hold to be 
sacred, and at once hallowed associations spring 
up on every side, and grow thick and fast. 

SWEDENBORG AS A POET 

T7I MERSON thinks that Swedenborg will be- 
"*-^ come popular when men no longer regard 
him as a "sectarian," and account him a poet.^ 
I much doubt the future popularity of the great 
Swedish seer, but I have for a long time viewed 
^Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1836-1838, p. 70. 



A COLLEGE OF JOURNALISM 113 

him as a poet. You must get beyond his dog- 
matism if you would find delight in his heavenly 
vision. Swedenborg is one of the greatest of 
poets. The man who takes Swedenborg at his 
own appraisement exchanges poetic rapture for 
poor and literal statements about a world of 
which we know but little. It is just because men 
do take him at his own appraisement that they 
get no further than the New Jerusalem Church, 
and never see the poetic beauty of his visions and 
apocalyptic disclosures. Swedenborg is a poet; 
as such I take him, and as such I read him. 

A COLLEGE OF JOURNALISM 

ALL things come round in due time. I de- 
livered in the First Congregational Church 
of Portland, Oregon, March 13, 1883, a sermon 
on "Editors and Newspapers," which was soon 
after printed in pamphlet form. In that ser- 
mon I recommended the establishment of a Col- 
lege of Journalism, where young men might be 
trained for the responsible duties they are called 
to discharge in preparing for the public the 
great journals that so powerfully affect public 
opinion. The suggestion met with little favor. 
In some places it was ridiculed. But now, in 



114 A FREE LANCE 

1912, twenty-nine years after the delivery of 
that discourse, the cornerstone of the Columbia 
University School of Journalism building, on 
Broadway and 116th Street, in the City of New 
York, has just been laid. A magnificent gift of 
two million dollars from Mr. Pulitzer rendered 
the school possible. 

In the copper box inside the cornerstone were 
deposited among other things an article on the 
School of Journalism in Columbia University, 
a report of the University Council on the or- 
ganization and academic relations of the School 
of Journalism ; agreements between Mr. Pulitzer 
and the heads of the University concerning the 
school; extracts from Mr. Pulitzer's will con- 
cerning the endowment; the curriculum of the 
school; Columbia's latest catalogue; an article 
by Dr. Williams, printed in the Columbia Uni- 
versity Quarterly and copies of the World, the 
Times, the Brooklyn Eagle and the Sun. Ed- 
itors of these papers are members of the advi- 
sory board of the school. 

I cannot but think a copy of the sermon re- 
ferred to, in which the new School of Journalism 
just established in connection with Columbia 
University was forecast and recommended, might 
have properly graced the copper box in the 



A COLLEGE OF JOURNALISM IIQ 

cornerstone; for, so far as I know, it contains 
the first suggestion of any such school. Jour- 
nalism is a branch of literature, and as such it 
should be taught either in a school by itself, or 
as a part of the voluntary or post-graduate 
curriculum of some established college. Thack- 
eray had an exalted opinion of journalism, and 
among his friends were many editors of not only 
national, but world-wide reputation. He never, 
so far as I know, thought of a school of journal- 
ism, but many are the good things he said of the 
influential papers of his country and of his day. 
My readers wiU no doubt recall these words 
from "Pendennis :" — 

"They were passing through the Strand as they 
talked, and by a newspaper office, which was all 
lighted up and bright. Reporters were coming out 
of the place, or rushing up to it in cabs; there were 
lamps burning in the editors' rooms, and above, 
where the compositors were at work, the windows 
of the building were in a blaze of gas. 'Look at 
that. Pen/ Warrington said. 'There she is — ^the 
great engine — she never sleeps. She has her am- 
bassadors in every quarter of the world, her cour- 
iers upon every road. Her officers march along with 
armies, and her envoys walk into statesmen's cab- 
inets. They are ubiquitous. Yonder journal has 



116 A FREE LANCE 

an agent at this minute giving bribes at Madrid, 
and another inspecting the price of potatoes in Co- 
vent Garden. Look! here comes the Foreign Ex- 
press galloping in. They will be able to give the 
news to Downing Street to-morrow; funds will rise 

or fall, fortunes be made or lost. Lord B 

will get up, and holding the paper in his hand, 
and seeing the noble marquis in his place, will make 
a great speech; and — and Mr. Doolan will be called 
away from his supper at the Back Kitchen, for he 
is foreign sub-editor, and sees the mail on the news- 
paper sheet before he goes to his own.' And so 
talking, the friends turned into their chambers, as 
the dawn was beginning to peep." 

Schopenhauer's idea of the newspaper and of 
journalism was by no means so high, but he also 
regarded the public paper, whether daily or 
weekly, as the mirror of the times. It was not 
simply a record of events, but it was as well an 
enlargement and display of them. He wrote: — 

"Exaggeration of every kind is as essential to 
journalism as it is to the dramatic art; for the 
object of journalism is to make events go as far 
as possible. Thus it is that all journalists are, 
in the very nature of their calling, alarmists; and 
this is their way of giving interest to what they 
write. Herein they are like little dogs; if any- 



PHARMACY 117 

thing stirs them, they immediately set up a shrill 
bark. 

"Therefore, let us carefully regulate the atten- 
tion to be paid to this triumph of danger, so that 
it may not disturb our digestion. Let us recognize 
that a newspaper is at best but a magnifying glass, 
and very often merely a shadow on the wall." 

Whitelaw Reld wrote: "The day is coming 
when the position of a first-class editor will be 
more influential in the United States than that 
of a member of the Cabinet at Washington." 
It is essential that so great an influence should 
be as well a worthy one. We may follow Scho- 
penhauer's advice, and so regulate the attention 
we give the journal that there shall be no dis- 
turbance of our digestion; but the great world 
will read, every year, still more eagerly the daily 
paper, and will be changed by the reading. All 
the more, then, do we need the College of Jour- 
nalism. 

PHARMACY 

T WAS present at the Commencement of the 
•■■ College of Pharmacy. The young men had 
made themselves proficient in pharmacy, chemis- 
try, and materia medica, with other branches of 
learning thought to be essential to the com- 



118 A FREE LANCE 

pounding of drugs. They received their diplo- 
mas, signed by grave and accomplished profess- 
ors. The clergyman who had been invited to 
open the exercises with prayer asked the Divine 
blessing and guidance for the young pharma- 
cists who were "leaving the halls of learning to 
engage in professional life." The orchestra 
discoursed sweet music. The orator indulged 
in flights of eloquence, and urged the youths to 
set before themselves high ideals. It was a 
grand affair. But one could not but smile in- 
wardly at the thought that in a few days or, at 
most, a fortnight, the larger number of the 
young men would be in charge of soda-water 
fountains, or dipping out ice-cream to eager 
youngsters. It was for that sort of thing, ap- 
parently, they had received instruction in such 
learned branches as have been named, and had 
obtained diplomas. 

Perhaps the clergyman would hardly have 
mentioned in prayer the distinguished services 
these young men were to render a much-to-be- 
congratulated community, had he stopped to con- 
template the fact that nine out of ten of those 
fountains of summer drink would do their larg- 
est business on Sunday while he was preaching 
the gospel in a neighboring church. The mod- 



PHARMACY 119 

ern drug shop is only a soda-water fountain 
with a small drug attachment. That being the 
case, there should be in the College of Pharmacy 
a learned chair of Soda-water Fountains; and, 
it may be, an associate professorship of Ice- 
cream. 

There is now a rage for colleges and profes- 
sions. Doubtless, before long there will be a 
College of Domestic Service, with a President 
and Faculty of Kitchen Girls, having, among 
other chairs, one of dish-towels. There are 
learned professions, and there are honorable oc- 
cupations that are not learned; law, medicine, 
and theology belong to the former, and the at- 
tending of counters in shops, of whatever kind, 
belongs to the latter. No doubt the apothecary 
should understand the putting up of prescrip- 
tions, and he should undergo an examination, 
and be licensed ; but why call his business a 
learned profession? It is nothing of the kind. 
Still further, what little dignity the pharmacy 
once had it has itself destroyed. It is now a 
sort of conglomerate establishment, where you 
can buy medicine or chewing-gum, an adhesive 
plaster or a kite and a bag of marbles, as you 
please. Why not have fewer drug shops, and 
have them real drug shops, where good medi- 



120 A FREE LANCE 

cines can be had, and where a prescription can 
be put up without danger to the patient? 

HYMNS BETTER THAN CREEDS 

T MUCH prefer the things men say of God in 
■*■ their hymns to the picture of Him found in 
the various treatises of theology, creeds, and 
sermons. 

VICTOR HUGO 



\ 7ICT0R HUGO added no thought to our in- 
' tellectual treasure, but our old and com- 
mon-place literary material he rendered mar- 
velously attractive by the pomp of his rhetoric. 
He is not a world-poet; no one would think of 
him as in the same class with Shakespeare; and 
yet he is a writer of no common sort. The 
serene creative light of Goethe's genius he had 
not, but he had action beyond anything to be 
found in the work of the German poet. His 
genius was that of revolution, revolt, insurrec- 
tion, protest. He found the air in his day sur- 
charged with the spirit of unrest, and he gave 
that spirit new expression. 



THE PRESENT 121 



II 



As an artist in words Hugo was what Dore 
was as an artist in lines and colors. Both 
painted with a large brush, and neither of the 
two men knew the meaning of simplicity. But 
in Hugo there was always the marvelous touch 
of the master. Music and color were every- 
where. 

THE PRESENT 

T TOW easily we remember the past! how 
-*• -■' eagerly we anticipate the future! but how 
little we improve the present ! We may recall the 
long ago remorsefully, we may dread the years 
to come, but we too easily forget that all our 
hope springs from the use we make of the pres- 
ent. Past and future are no longer ours, nor 
have they any existence; the present alone re- 
mains, and it is ours. 

THE AGNOSTIC 

A SORROWFUL agnostic I can well under- 
stand, but a joyous one astonishes me. 
A man may regretfully acknowledge his igno- 
rance, but what shall be said of him when he 



122 -A FREE LANCE 

tosses his cap in the air and boasts of that igno- 
rance before all the world? One may not be re- 
sponsible for want of knowledge, but why should 
he rejoice in that want? That all men are 
equally ignorant upon the subject under dis- 
cussion does not help matters; on the contrary, 
it should deepen sorrow, for it renders the want 
of knowledge more hopeless. Yet I find boast- 
ful agnostics who think confessed ignorance a 
thing to be proud of. The man who is wanting 
in information with regard to some question in 
mechanics is rarely known to rejoice in his ig- 
norance ; but when he comes to consider the 
vastly more important question of religion, he is 
boastful of his want of knowledge. His changed 
attitude with regard to the question of religion 
can be explained in only one way: his want of 
knowledge gives him pleasure, and he does not 
desire instruction. He loves darkness rather 
than light. 



w 



MODERN POETRY ARTIFICIAL 

HY is it in this age poets can get no 
hearing? Why is it no publisher will 
touch a book of verse? The world loves good 
poetry, and always will love it. Why is it, then, 
that poetry is a drug in the market? I think 



SONGLESS VERSE NOT POETRY 123 

the reason is that our poets no longer write for 
the people, but everywhere address those only who 
have artistic and artificial tastes. The poetry 
of this age is excellent, but it appeals only to 
the few. Could Burns return to earth, our age 
would welcome his verses with great joy of heart. 
Not much was said a hundred years ago about 
the technique of verse, and few cared for those 
fine conceits that so please verse-makers of the 
present time. The taste for much of our mod- 
ern poetry is like that for olives — wholly ac- 
quired. 

SONGLESS VERSE IS NOT POETRY 

T WEARY of hearing this perpetual discourse 
""■ concerning the moral purpose of poetic art. 
The end and aim of all good verse is song. The 
composition need not be distinctively lyric, and 
yet songless verse, be it never so correct in meas- 
ure and pleasing in structure, is not poetry. 

WE ARE RULED BY THE DEAD 

Q^TAND of a Sunday morning in any cathe- 
^^ dral, and you may hear the dead sing and 
preach; you may hear them avow their faith. 
The wax-tapers that burn upon the altar were 



124 A FREE LANCE 

lighted centuries ago by priests and acolytes 
who put aside their white surplices and fell 
asleep when the great city was young. Unseen 
hands swing the glittering censer, and they will 
still swing it, filling the air with clouds of in- 
cense, when other centuries have gone by. How 
very old is the service ! It will continue, it may 
be, so long as man continues to dwell upon the 
earth, and in it the living and the dead are one. 
We are ruled by the dead. From their urns 
they lay hold of us, and whither they will they, 
turn us. 



POPULAR GOVERNMENT 

/GOVERNMENT of the people, by the peo- 
^^ pie, and for the people" is likely to be a 
very good government or a very bad one, but it 
is seldom anything between. 

THE SUCCESSFUL POLITICIAN 

T HEARD a successful politician say: "My 
■■■ fellow citizens have forced upon me honors 
and offices from which I shrink, and from which 
I would gladly escape. My friends all know 
how domestic and retiring I am in my tastes, 



EVANGELICAL BOOKS DULL 125 

and it is difficult to see why they have insisted 
upon forcing me into public life, for which na- 
ture has so poorly qualified me. I have ever 
cherished the hope that it might be my lot to 
serve my country in some humble station, far re- 
moved from noise and excitement ; and I have de- 
sired no other reward than that of seeing my 
fellow citizens prosperous and happy. I reluc- 
tantly accept an ojBSce which I feel in my heart 
should have fallen to a worthier man." 

There is a surprising beauty that our English 
language is powerless to describe, in the more- 
than-Christian humility and unselfish patriotism 
of the average politician. Where in all the 
world can we match the modest and retiring dis- 
position and the irreproachable integrity of a 
New York alderman? 

EVANGELICAL BOOKS DULL 

pROFESSOR SIHLER calls Lessing's "Na- 
*■• than the Wise" the Canticum Canticorum 
of Deism. Well said ! Why is it that the books 
we call "evangelical" are so often dull? I sup- 
pose it is because they lack human sympathy. 
They shut their readers in on every side with 
wrought-iron traditions. Nothing so ofi^ends 



126 A FREE LAN'CE 

their authors as an inclmation on the part of 
their readers to form an independent opinion. 
If you love Hberty, whether of mind or person, 
always allow the "'"'Right Reverend Fathers in 
God" to go by on the other side, 

THE SENSUOUS WORLD IS SY^IBOLIC 

nr^HE sensuous world is purely symbolic. It 
-*- is a vast show in which men provide their 
own entertainment, actor and spectator being 
one and the same person. 

WHERE TO LOOK 

SIDNEY wrote, '"Xook in thy heart, and 
write." I should think a glance at one's 
own heart would render writing difficult. Why 
not look at the needs of others, so far as they 
may be discovered, and write with them in 
view? 



GLADSTONE 

GLADSTONE was certainly a "great and 
good man," but I do not see why he should 
go down in history as the champion of the rights 
of the common man, and as the friend of the 



TOO YOUNG FOR HISTORY 127 

oppressed. He generally managed to be on the 
wrong side of whatever great moral question 
was before the English public. He was on the 
wrong side of the Engljsh Church question, of 
the Irish question, and of the American Civil 
War question. He said during the Civil War 
that he "expected the liberation of the slaves by 
their own masters sooner than by the North.'* 
He said, "Jefferson Davis and the leaders of the 
South have made an army; they are soon, I un- 
derstand, to have a navy; but, greater than all 
this, they have made a nation." Well, Mr. 
Davis did not make a nation, but somebody in 
England made a fool of himself. In nothing 
was the real greatness of Gladstone more mani- 
fest than in the ability he exhibited of retaining 
his influence and power in the face of so many 
colossal mistakes. 



THE UNITED STATES TOO YOUNG FOR 
HISTORY 

nnHE United States is yet too young a coun- 
-*• try for anything like an exhaustive his- 
tory. Time is an important element in the 
preparation of trustworthy records, annals, and 
chronicles. One must view the events of which 
one writes from a suiBcient distance, but the 



128 A FREE LANCE 

distance should not be so great that it obscures 
those events and renders them indistinct. Pub- 
lishers announce from time to time a history of 
the Civil War, and reviewers recommend the 
book. Believe them not. When another cen- 
tury shall have passed away it may be possible 
to write the history of what we sometimes call 
the Great Rebellion. 



LONGFELLOW 

T ONGFELLOW may not be so original as 
•'-^ are some of the poets for whom we care 
less, and he may be open to some of the criticism 
with which Poe and others assailed him, but he 
is now, and will long remain, the most dearly be- 
loved and most frequently quoted of all our 
American poets. 

A BRAZEN JACKASS 

rriHE children of Israel worshiped in the wil- 
■*■ derness, so it is recorded, a Golden Calf. 
Had they been living not very long ago in Chi- 
cago and been attending in that city a certain 
political convention, they might have given a 
pleasing variety to their worship by falling 



SIMPLER RELATIONS 129 

down before a Brazen Jackass. There is such 
a thing as taste even in religion. 

SIMPLER RELATIONS 

NO two men," said Emerson, "but being left 
alone with each other enter into simpler 
relations." That depends upon what you call 
"simpler relations." I know of two men who, 
so soon as they were left alone with each other, 
came to blows. 

SUPPRESSION OF KNOWLEDGE 

fTlHE suppression of knowledge on the ground 
^ of expediency is like the quenching of the 
sun. The Man of Galilee said, "I am the Light 
of the world." That in some measure should 
every man be. What new truth I possess must 
be imparted. The good man is a socialist when 
he comes to the field of ethics. 

TRUTH 



LL private ownership in truth is moral 
robbery. 



130 A FREE LANCE 

II 

I must not only impart what truth I possess, 
but I must also welcome new truth from what- 
ever source. To reject any truth because it 
seems to contradict a preconceived opinion, is 
to quench the light ; and of all sins those against 
light are the most deadly. I must tell the truth 
and shock the world. 

THE MOB 

rilHE man who would argue with a mob may 
"*■ count upon defeat before he begins his argu- 
ment. Napoleon knew how useless it was to 
argue with such mobs as inaugurated in France 
the "Terror" of '93, and his instant appeal was 
to arms. The red night-fires of his soldiers tore 
even the robe of darkness from the bloodthirsty 
wretches hiding in every place of concealment. 
He argued only with the blazing lips of cannon, 
and with the remorseless tread of trained and 
disciplined troops. 

JOHN HANCOCK 

JOHN HANCOCK may have been a patriot, 
but if Harvard University (then College) 
had been compelled to take up with more men of 



JOHN HANCOCK 131 

Hancock's moral equipment there would not be 
much of a university in Cambridge to-day. Some- 
thing like fifteen thousand and four hundred 
pounds of College funds was paid over to him 
(a large sum for those days), and that was the 
last Harvard saw of the sum until, after his 
death, his heirs, who had a cleaner account with 
conscience, made honorable restitution. For a 
quarter of a century the College begged and 
threatened, but not one cent could it recover 
during the distinguished patriot's stay on earth. 
It is not a pleasant transaction to contemplate, 
but history is history, and the truth should be 
told — so Quincy thought when he published his 
"History of Harvard University." 

The men who signed the Declaration of In- 
dependence were, many of them, men of uncom- 
promising uprightness, and they were, as well, 
men of great courage ; but human nature was no 
more angelic then than it is now. The average 
man, of whatever circle in society, will average 
about the same in one age as in another. One 
sample of honesty will come up to the standard 
of other samples if circumstances and knowledge 
be taken into account ; and the only reason there 
is no recognized common standard is that it is 
impossible to say just what any single specimen 



132 A FREE LANCE 

is worth. It may be that our revolutionary 
fathers were far above the average in honesty, 
but they certainly could not, all of them, have 
believed the Declaration of Independence, which 
they nevertheless signed; that is to say, they 
could not have believed it in anything but a 
Pickwickian sense. When they signed the docu- 
ment, with its statement that "all men are born 
free and equal," they knew very well that 
slavery was a part of their system. They knew 
also that the "inalienable" rights named in the 
Declaration were not inalienable. And they 
knew many other things which the children who 
came after them never gave them credit for 
knowing. It is astonishing how Glory takes to 
the woods when History turns upon her the 
blaze of her searchlight. If we would fare 
better with our children and stand well with our 
consciences, it is incumbent upon us to do better 
while we have the opportunity. 



RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION IN PUBLIC 
SCHOOLS 

rpHOUGHTFUL minds, troubled about the 

"*■ condition of their country, turn with hope 

to Popular Education. The value of such an 



SOCIALISM 133 

education cannot be overestimated, but it must 
be of the right kind. And it must be fortified 
by a substantial ethical safeguard of some sort. 
There are those who believe that we sacrifice our 
safeguard when we forbid the imparting of re- 
ligious instruction in public schools ; and yet 
the very persons who thus believe are unable 
to show us how we may furnish such instruction 
where there is no state church, and at the same 
time avoid sectarian aggression. The moment 
we provide religious instruction, we throw our- 
selves open to all manner of proselyting ; and yet 
even a state church, which is the natural and 
final result of proselyting, is better than ex- 
tinction. 

SOCIALISM 



rilHE Socialist tells us it is the duty of the 
-*• State to provide for the individual, but he 
does not stop to reflect upon the fact that the 
State that is to provide and the individuals that 
are to be provided for are one and the same 
thing. If the State provides for the individual, 
it can do so only because individuals have first 
provided for the State, You can draw from a 



134* A FREE LANCE 

bank only so much money as you have deposited 
in that bank. There is no State apart from the 
individuals that compose it ; and what those in- 
dividuals are, that the State must become. If 
Socialists want the State to care for them, then 
they must care for the State. They will get out 
of it only what they put into it. I fail of 
seeing what they gain when they receive only 
what they have given. Well, suppose the State 
becomes the dispenser of all there is to dis- 
pense, and that it guarantees to every man a 
living: how much will the State be able to dis- 
pense unless men guarantee to it honest and 
continuous work? Might they not just as well 
toil for themselves as for the State? Is not 
work for the one work for the other? 

II 

One would think there were enough loafers in 
our cities and villages without making an eflFort 
to increase the number of idle and worthless men 
and women. But Socialism proposes to pauper- 
ize the entire nation by guaranteeing to every 
individual a good living. Civilization is, like 
every other good thing, founded upon honest 
toil. No man ever had an inherent right to a 
living. It is the law of Nature that if a man 



SOCIALISM 135 

will not work he must starve. Whatever guar- 
antees to him a living without toil lifts him at 
once above the requirements of that law. So- 
cialism would give to every man such guaranty, 
destroying at a stroke all incentive to an in- 
dustrious and useful life. The system has been 
rightly described as "the lazy man's Utopia.'* 
It is the delightful dream of seedy individuals 
who, having beer incomes, are "tormented by 
champagne tastes." 

A writer in a New York paper some time ago 
called Socialism "the dream of vengeance of the 
weak man against the strong." Therein lies its 
most ugly characteristic. With its impractica- 
bilit}'^ it mixes the most deadly hatred. It takes 
for granted that the prosperous man is a de- 
spoiler of his race ; one of its most popular texts 
is nothing less than an assault upon all private 
property. Holding that private property is 
robbery, it yet stretches out its hands, and is 
clamorous for a division of that robbery. Even 
savages have property, and I think but few of 
the children of the forest would relish a proposal 
to have the bows and arrows of the prosperous 
divided so that the lazy and worthless should 
have an equal share. 

One of the worst features of Socialism is, as 



136 A FREE LANCE 

has been said, the bitter hatred it engenders. It 
tells the poor man that the property of every 
wealthy man belongs in part to him. It calls 
every rich man a robber. Of course nothing of 
the kind is true. There are honest rich men, 
and there are as well some dishonest poor men. 
Yet this evil system goes on embittering man 
against man, and leading to crime after crime. 

Ill 

No system of government can ever change 
human nature. Men would be just as selfish 
under Socialism as they now are under a Re- 
public. No brotherhood of love can be evolved 
from the hard scramble for place and possessions 
by relieving men of the common burdens of life ; 
in fact, such foolish relief must only increase the 
selfishness of man's heart. It is the claim of 
Socialists that the inequalities of life are in large 
measure due to human selfishness ; but selfishness 
goes much deeper than government, and deeper 
than the mere accident of birth and circum- 
stance; it is, unfortunately, an element inherent 
in human nature. It will appear in every state 
and under all circumstances, so long as it exists 
in our nature. Among the most selfish of all 
men will be found those who have been relieved 



SOCIALISM 137 

of anxiety, and who are provided with wealth 
and ease. Socialism would make the world all 
the more selfish by guaranteeing to every one 
the very things that make people selfish. More- 
over, it would create a vast stagnation by ren- 
dering us all equally well off. Equality in pos- 
sessions could not but remove every incentive to 
work. We labor to obtain more than we have; 
but we would not labor had we all we want. 
Were all equally well off, there could be no such 
thing as service, for all men would be masters. 
Think of a millionaire banker riding behind his 
millionaire coachman! 

IV 

This is, so far as I know and so far as I have 
been able to discover, the true Socialistic pro- 
gramme. Not all of these items would be 
acknowledged by every Socialist, and, perhaps, 
no one would wholly approve the entire pro- 
gramme, but for "substance of doctrine" this 
representation is in every way just and fair. 
Of course the arrangement chosen is not pre- 
cisely such as a trained Socialist might be ex- 
pected to adopt, but the items here catalogued 
are either held in the form given, or as logical 
and fair deductions from the system itself. 



138 A FREE LANCE 

1. Abolition of all private property. 

2. Abolition of the wage-system. 

8. Abolition of the competitive system. 
4«. Abolition of all private banking and in- 
surance business. 

6. Government ownership of all land, machin- 
ery, railroads, telegraph lines, and canals. 

7. The organization of national and interna- 
tional trades and labor unions on a socialistic 
basis. 

8. Cooperative production, with a just distri- 
bution of its rewards. 

9. All wages to be paid at intervals of time 
not exceeding one week. 

10. All conspiracy laws operating against the 
right of working-men to strike, or to induce 
others to strike, shall be repealed. 

11. Gratuitous administration of justice in all 
courts of law. 

12. A graded income tax. 

13. All banking and insurance to be con- 
ducted by the general government. 

14. All public officers to be subject to prompt 
recall. 

TWO REPUBLICS 
T HAVE been greatly impressed by the close 
■^ resemblance between the old Roman Repub- 



TWO REPUBLICS 139 

He at the time when it was about to become an 
empire, and our own modern Republic, the 
United States of America, now that it appears 
to be verging upon dissolution. The decadent 
features seem very much the same in both, as any 
student may see if he will be at the pains to com- 
pare the two governments in the light of history 
and in that of present conditions in our own 
country. The tabulation given below brings out, 
I think, this sad but interesting resemblance be- 
tween the two great republics of history. It 
may not be too late to profit by the lesson of 
the past. If it be not too late, then the writer 
who brings before his readers the peril both he 
and they would gladly escape may not write 
wholly in vain. 

ROMAN REPUBLIC AMERICAN REPUBLIC 

1. Decrease in Patri- 1. Decrease in Patri- 

otism, with growing otism, with growing 

idealization of the idealization of the 

Roman standards. flag and historic 

places and associa- 
tions. 

2. Popular inclination 2. Rise and great influ- 
in the direction of ence of demagogues, 
demagogues and agi- self -seekers, polit- 
tators. ical schemers; pop- 
ular approval of 
men like Bvyan, 



140 



A FREE LANCE 



3. Immense fortunes. 



4. Great speculation in 

real estate. 

5. Cornering of food- 

stuffs. 

6. General corruption 
in politics. 

7. Demoralization of 
the family; divorce; 
few children among 
the rich. 

8. The homes of the 
wealthy full of 
treasures of art and 
of bric-a-brac. 



9. Great extravagance 

of women; luxurious 
living ; contempt for 
manual labor and 
all kinds of domes- 
tic service. 

10. Unwillingness o f 
the poor to work; 
vagabondage ; in the 
city of Rome a large 
percentage of men 
without fixed habita- 
tion. 



Roosevelt and Till- 
man. 
S. Enormous fortunes, 
trusts, and colossal 
monetary schemes 
and combinations. 

4. Great speculation in 
many directions. 

5. Cornering of the 
necessities of life. 

6. "Graft" in both poli- 
tics and business. 

7. Divorce common; 

few children among 
the rich. 

8. Palaces of lavish 
and wasteful ex- 
travagance for the 
wealthy; costly jew- 
els and luxurious 
living. 

9. Rise of labor unions 
and the passing 
away of skilled labor 
and domestic serv- 
ice. 

10. Disinclination to 
work ; increasing 
number of "tramps," 
loafers, and men 
without fixed habita- 
tion. 



BRITISH RULE 



141 



11. General spread of 
unbelief; neglect of 
the gods, the tem- 
ples, and religious 
observances. 

12. Great literary ac- 
tivity, with little 
seriousness and not 
much originality. 



13, Alarming increase 
of insanity and 
crime. 



11. General unsettling 
of belief ; growing 
doubt with regard to 
fundamental d o c- 
trines of Christian- 
ity. 

12. Great literary activ- 
ity, with little seri- 
ousness of thought. 
Not much original- 
ity. Countless nov- 
els. 

13. Alarming increase 
of insanity and 
crime. 



BRITISH RULE 



"DRITISH rule in India is well-nigh perfect of 
•*^ its kind, and its kind is surely good, but 
no rule was ever more unpopular. It is a strong 
and safe rule, but there is nothing about it 
pleasing to the pride and indolence of the 
natives. Its strength and weakness are prac- 
tically one and the same thing. People ener- 
vated by a tropical climate like nothing that 
exhibits energy and firmness, both of which 
qualities are essential to English rule, and es- 
sential also to India's prosperity. England is 
the world's great colonizer, and every country 



142 :a: free lance 

she takes under her wing is made thereby better 
and happier. It will be a sore day for our 
world when she relaxes her strong yet gentle 
hold on Ireland. The American Revolution 
taught her, at our expense, the lesson of colonial 
government, and that lesson has been remem- 
bered. We may be said to have purchased for 
the world much of its peace and happiness, at 
great cost to ourselves, when we fought the 
mother-land and set up for ourselves, surren- 
dering so many things that less important peo- 
ples possess and enjoy. 

MOST MEN HAVE ORDINARY ABILITIES 

TV ^OST of the young men in this and in every 
•^ -*• other country have only ordinary abilities, 
and yet American boys will not prepare them- 
selves for such ordinary occupations as they are 
able to pursue. The "Every-Man-a-Sovereign" 
doctrine is rapidly coming to jflower in the 
**Every-Man-a-rool" experience. Great husky 
fellows who were created for manual labor, and 
who should be on a farm or in a shop, are study- 
ing painting, architecture, and literature. Con- 
tempt for rough work is one of the banes of 
our age and country. The common mechanical 



MEN HAVE ORDINARY ABILITIES 143 

pursuits do not bring an easy and swift fortune, 
and for that reason they are despised and 
avoided. It is now very hard to find a good 
workman. There are few skilled mechanics. 
And men are generally unwilling to till the soil 
unless the tilling be on a very large scale. To 
sit all day in a broker's office, watching the 
fluctuation of railway stocks and betting on their 
rise or fall ; to peddle worthless mining stocks ; 
or to control corrupt political parties and meas- 
ures — these occupations seem to the young men 
of our country more alluring than more useful 
and honorable employments. The "Get-rich- 
quick" idea, coupled with the great American 
lie, "All men are bom free and equal," has sent 
the coming generation off on a fool's picnic, the 
end whereof must be failure. 

The entire drift of republican thought and 
feeling is away from work, and in the direction 
of individualism and self-indulgence. Every 
man has a vote, and every man must be con- 
sulted with regard to every question. The man 
may have no brains, but the elective franchise 
has given him a voice, and he can make a noise 
even if he can do nothing more. Election day 
summons thousands of ignorant men to express 
their worthless opinions. Two such opinions go 



lU A FREE LANCE 

further and count for more than one opinion of 
a better sort. The majority rule, and the 
trained and qualified take back seats. Ours is 
the wisdom of numbers. Not many voters un- 
derstand much about the questions concerning 
which they vote, yet the privilege of registering 
one's ignorance at the polls is the priceless pre- 
rogative of an American citizen. Thus it comes 
to pass that skilled labor goes to the wall, labor 
unions with their vast deposit of folly come to 
the front, and ignorance and inexperience win 
the day alike in politics and industry. 

THE APPROACHING PERIOD 

T^ 7E are now approaching a critical period in 
* ' the history of this great Republic. We 
have left far behind the beauty, grace, and ster- 
ling integrity which marked the character and 
administration of Washington and the few men 
who were of his mind and manners. We are a 
republic modeled after the thought and feeling 
of Jeiferson, and not after the opinions and 
teaching of Washington and Hamilton. It will 
soon appear whether Jefferson's idea of govern- 
ment has sufficient strength to hold together the 
divergent elements that are contending with each 



CONTEMPT FOR MANUAL LABOR 145 

other; whether it will be able to resist the de- 
structive influences of political intrigue, the sale 
and purchase of votes, pension-grabbing, the 
crime introduced by immigration, the murderous 
Black Hand and other organizations of the kind> 
the dense ignorance of large numbers of foreign- 
ers, the selfishness of astute politicians, the co- 
lossal greed of capitalistic combinations, and the 
general corruption which fills every thoughtful 
mind with dismay. The outlook is anything but 
encouraging. It is as Henry George has said, 
"The struggle that^must either revivify or con- 
vulse in ruin is near at hand, if it be not already 
begun." 

CONTEMPT FOR MANUAL LABOR 

CONTEMPT for manual labor seems to be a 
necessary result of popular government. 
We fix in this country no limit to the ambition 
of any man. The most illiterate youth in the 
most unimportant family in all the length and 
breadth of these United States is assured over 
and over again by politicians and stump-orators 
that if he will but aspire to place and power, he 
may become our chief executive. Fillmore and 
Johnson were in early life tailors, Lincoln was 



146 A FREE LANCE 

a rail-splitter. Garfield was a canal-boy. 
Even Washington was in early life a surveyor. 
Why should not Tom, Dick, and Harry leave 
lowly occupations, to govern the State of New 
York, or preside over the affairs of an entire 
nation? Other men have risen, and why should 
not any boy do what others have done? 

The possibility is as stated, but how few con- 
sider the remoteness of the probability. And so 
it comes to pass that the present labor is de- 
spised. Why should one perfect hand and brain 
in that which must so soon be laid aside for the 
exalted positions and duties that under a popu- 
lar government await Tom, Dick, and Harry? 
It rarely occurs to the young man to ask if there 
was not something more than mere opportunity 
required for the splendid achievements and his- 
toric importance of Washington, Lincoln, and 
Grant. 

As the housemaid believes that the only 
difference between her mistress and herself is 
that of money or of fine clothes, so the village 
lubber holds that the only difference between the 
wisest and ablest man that ever walked this earth 
and himself is that of opportunity. He will tell 
you that the same opportunity must in either 
case, or in both cases, produce exactly the same 



WORK IS HONORABLE 147 

result ; all of which is as untrue as would be the 
statement that, given the same soil, moisture, 
light, and temperature, all seeds must come to 
the same flower. 

WORK IS HONORABLE 
/ 
'l^T'ORK is honorable, and bread and butter 

* » are quite as respectable as are ortolan 
and choice wines. We are, most of us, created 
on the bread-and-butter side of life, and upon 
that side we are wanted. To improve the work 
that belongs to us and that awaits us is much 
better than to do poorly work that does not be- 
long to us. It was the enemy of mankind who 
whispered into the attentive but inexperienced 
ear of our great progenitor, "Ye shall be as 
gods ;" and it is the same old enemy that to-day 
whispers to the sons of men, "Leave off serving 
in humble stations, and you shall become the 
arbiters of destiny and the rulers of the 
world." Carlyle said in all his life no wiser 
words than these: "Work is man's true maj- 
esty." Said also the ancient Oracle, "Do to- 
day thy nearest duty," — do it with all thy 
might, and do it well. 

In the old days in England service, like lord- 



148 A FREE LANCE 

ship, extended through many generations, and 
perfected itself with the years. Men were not 
ashamed of service. They contemplated with 
noble pride the well-performed work of 
grandfather, and great-grandfather, and it was 
their ambition to do their own work as well. 
The butler did not trouble his head with dreams 
of Parliament. Now no man will work if he can 
escape the necessity. Why should he perfect 
himself in that which he despises, and which he 
regards as nothing but a stepping-stone to some- 
thing better? When you take the dignity out 
of labor, you destroy the quality and value of 
labor for all the world. 

ENGLISH RULE IN AMERICA 

ri^HE rule of England in America was never 
-*" the hard and ugly thing our Fourth-of- 
July patriots would have us believe. Senator 
Hoar said, in a speech delivered at South Bos- 
ton, March 18th, 1901: "The government of 
England was, in the main, a gentle government, 
much as our fathers complained of it. Her yoke 
was easy and her burden was light; our fathers 
were a hundred times better off in 1775 than were 
the men of Kent, the vanguard of liberty in Eng- 



ENGLISH RULE IN AMERICA 149 

land. There was more happiness in Middlesex 
on the Concord than there was in Middlesex on 
the Thames." 

The government of England was in early 
times not so mild as it is to-day, but it was al- 
ways in advance of the age; it is in advance of 
the age in which we live, and it will, no doubt, 
remain the leader of all ages in the wisdom and 
mildness of its administration. Every govern- 
ment has its own peculiar worth to the entire 
world, but the mission of England has always 
been, notwithstanding its many civil and for- 
eign wars, one of peace and domestic happiness. 
It has made the world a safe place to live in. 
The English have great respect for law. Noth- 
ing seems to them quite so bad as anarchy. 
Their judges and courts have authority, and 
their decisions are respected. Wherever the 
English flag waves, life, liberty, and property 
are protected. It is not so with us. We can 
scarcely keep our judges from becoming the 
creatures of political factions. We have lost 
much of our reverence for law, and in some parts 
of our country the citizens can hardly be called 
law-abiding. I have no doubt that were we un- 
der the government of England, law and order 
as well as personal liberty would be for us a 



150 A FREE LANCE 

larger and richer possession. Still, it would be 
at the sacrifice of that national independence 
which both England and America hold dear. 

MINOR POETS 

T HAVE in my library a number of books 
■*■ written by poets little known to the reading 
world. Some of the books contain verses of 
great beauty and of rare worth. Why is it that 
their authors never succeeded in attracting the 
attention they deserved, and which their more 
fortunate confreres so easily secured? I use the 
word "confreres" because the order of poets is 
always religious. There could be no religion but 
of mud-gods and dirt-worship, without the over- 
hanging dream-world of which the poet is 
prophet and interpreter. We shall never know 
how great is the world's indebtedness to the mas- 
ters of song who prevent men from living by 
bread alone. "Where there is no vision," said 
the sacred writer, "the people perish." The 
breath of spiritual life is preserved within us 
by the revelations of those sons of light. 

Why are so many of them neglected? Why 
do they fail of reasonable recognition? The 
cause is only remotely in the poets themselves, 



MINOR POETS 151 

while it is in general, and most clearly in the 
unspiritual crowd of money-makers, log-rollers, 
and pleasure-seekers we call the world. These 
count the easiest way the way to take; and the 
easiest way is the one others have already taken. 
The common verdict of the unthinking multi- 
tude is accepted without question. "Can there 
any good thing come out of Nazareth?" Why, 
certainly not. No good thing ever did come 
from a new place ; and, what is more, we are busy 
making mud-pies, and do not want to be troubled 
about either Nazareth or good things. The 
poets who years ago fought their way to the 
front are great; being at the front makes them 
great, and there the matter ends. Of course 
new poets want recognition. The toad may 
want a tail, but he has it not. We take poet 
and toad for what they are. It may be that 
when the one gets a tail the other will get rec- 
ognition. 

Are the publishers different from the un- 
spiritual crowd of earth-worshipers? On the 
contrary, they are a part of that crowd. Pretty 
much all there is to get out of literature they 
get for themselves. The writers of stories pro- 
duce "marketable stuff" — that is to say, the 
stuff the crowd want, and will pay for in good 



152 A FREE LANCE 

money. But the man who, in these days, writes 
a fine poem wastes ink that might be more 
profitably employed in casting up accounts or 
in making out bills. No publisher, in this com- 
mercial age, encourages such waste of good ma- 
terial. 

The poets, great and small, give us, if they 
are in truth poets, and not merely artistic ver- 
sifiers, gladness of heart. The age may think 
poorly of them, but we know their worth. Pub- 
lishers may not be willing to print what they 
have written, but the books they have given us 
we will cherish. Surely these sons of light have 
done for us all that the old dramatist Heywood 
represents them as doing for himself and others. 
And what they have already done for us, they 
are still doing, and will continue to do so long 
as we open to them our hearts, and drink in their 
inspiration and their song. 

"They cover us with counsel to defend us 
From storms without; they polish us within 
With learning, knowledge, arts, and disciplines; 
All that is nought and vicious they sweep from us 
Like dust and cobwebs; our rooms concealed 
Hang with the costliest hangings 'bout the walls, 
Emblems and beauteous symbols pictured round." 

Many centuries before our English bard lived 



THE CROWD 153 

and wrote, another and a wiser poet sang the 
just praise of his own great and worthy fellow- 
ship of song: — 

'0^ oX^to<:^ SvTiva Mouaai 
<f>iXu)VTar rXuKepjj oi aizb arofiaro^ ^iet au8^. 
El yap Tfc Kol -nivdoii e^tov veoKtjSil dufiip 
aZtjTat KpaZirjv dKa^TJfievo':, abrap d.oih6<: 
Moutrdwv depdittov KkeJa nporiptov dvOptOTztov 
Ofiv:jff7j, pdKapdi re deovt:, oi' OXufxnov ix^oaiv, 
a\(}/ SXe 8u6<f>poveiov incXjjdeTai, ouSi Tt KfjUcav 
fiifivTjTac raj^iioi Se irapirpaTts SaJpa Geucav. 

Blessed is he whom the Muses love! Sweetly do his 
words flow from his lips. Is there one afflicted with fresh 
sorrow, pining away with deep grief? Then if the minstrel, 
servant of the Muses, sings the glorious deeds of men of 
yore, the praise of the blessed gods who dwell in Olympus, 
quickly does he forget his sorrows, nor remembers aught 
of all his griefs; for the gifts of these goddesses swiftly 
turn his woes away. 



THE CROWD 

rpHERE is no excuse for sheriffs in the South 
-*■ who surrender their black prisoners to 
noisy mobs. Those mobs are in most cases cow- 
ardly and easily outwitted. And, still further, 
aU sheriffs and officers of the law should be 



154. A FREE LANCE 

taught to handle large bodies of men, whether 
armed or unarmed. No crowd is to be trusted. 
It matters not that the concourse is well dis- 
posed; a single word may change the most 
peaceable crowd into a furious mob. No wild 
animal is so fierce and cruel as is an enraged 
mob, and yet well-nigh all mobs are cowardly. 
That is their one good feature; it renders dis- 
persion possible with fewer shots and a much 
lighter mortality. 

I witnessed the Orange Riot in the City of 
New York many years ago. I was in the crowd, 
where I saw deeds of shame and cruelty that I 
should like to forget. From that day to this 
I have dreaded large crowds. A crowd, of 
whatever kind, is always to be viewed with ap- 
prehension ; even if it is not likely to become 
criminal, still it may easily become the victim of 
panic. In a densely-packed theatre one may 
at once change all the fine ladies and gallant 
gentlemen into a mass of struggling humanity 
by shouting. Fire! A little smoke oozing out 
from behind the proscenium will unfold in five 
seconds more human nature than can be described 
upon twice as many pages of foolscap. Do not 
understand me to say that there are no brave 
men and serene women in the world. There are 



THE BtILL MOOSE IN GREEK 155 

many such. What I wish to say is that there 
are fewer such men and women than the easy- 
going optimist would have us believe. The 
nobler qualities of human nature are with the 
few, and only when we are governed by the few 
are we governed by those qualities. You may 
be sure that there is little wisdom and not much 
courage with the crowd. 



THE BULL MOOSE IN GREEK 

rilHE prevision of the seer has in all ages of 
■*• our world's history astonished the sons of 
men. Nearly every century has its more con- 
spicuous prophets, who, looking down the ages, 
foretell events that later came to pass. The 
Hebrew prophets stand at the head, and after 
them come other predicters who, without inspira- 
tion, astonished those who came under the spell 
of their marvelous genius. In still later times 
Swedenborg captured the consciences of men. 
But one of the strangest of all miracles of pre- 
vision is that of the Greek dramatist Euripides. 
He seems to have actually seen upon the far- 
away horizon of American politics our race of 
demagogues. He described that race; and who 



156 A FREE LANCE 

can fail of seeing Roosevelt in all his war-paint 
upon that classic page, as the never-to-be-envied 
chieftain of the thankless crew "whom like am- 
bition joins" to sway the loveless mob. Could 
prophecy come nearer home than do these lines 
that took their rise in a Greek mind, and have 
wandered down the ages to mirror the man to 
whom we owe so little, and from whom we have 
reason to fear so much? Think of it — the Bull 
Moose in Greek! Is it not like the prevision of 
the Hebrew king who described the "naughty 
person" of Proverbs vi:12-15? 

'A^dptffTov Vfiuiv ffrripfi, 8 trot 8rjfir}y6poo^ 

ol Todi <jitXoU(: ^XaTZTOVTSi OU <f>pOVTlZeTS, 



THE NEW BEELZEBUB 

rriHE parent who named his son Beelzebub has 
-■" retired from active life, and taken up his 
abode in the violent ward of an asylimi for the 
insane ; but the parent, who, by precept and con- 
duct, educated his son into a veritable Beelzebub, 
was elected school-commissioner, and is now chair- 
man of a committee charged with the responsible 



MOSAICS 157 

duty of devising some plan for the better moral 
training of the young. 



MOSAICS 



N 



O one ever recovered a lost faith by adver- 
tising for it. 



II 

Good-natured mediocrity is like an old slipper : 
one wears it when he has nothing better, and he 
is sure to find it wonderfully comfortable. 

Ill 
If there is no judge in heaven, there is surely 
all the greater need for a judge within thine own 
heart. 

IV 

There is always at the heart of every great 
happiness a sense of melancholy without which 
the happiness would be nothing more than a 
trivial gayety. 

V 

There is a certain companionship in sound. 
The man who pokes fun at death whistles to keep 
his courage up. Passing a graveyard after 
dark, he thinks to scare the spectres of which 



158 A FREE LANCE 

he is afraid, by making a noise. The sound of 
one's own voice inspires courage even when noth- 
ing is said worth the saying. 

VI 

Who administers consolation in advance of 
the occasion only adds a new sorrow to the one 
he would assuage. 

VII 

Truth casts off first this creed and then that, 
as the serpent sheds year after year its once 
bright and glittering skin. The integument, 
becoming dry and useless, must perish, but the 
living creature survives. Let no man mourn for 
Truth. 

VIII 

Whether a flag is worth fighting for will de- 
pend upon what that flag stands for. Uncon- 
ditional loyalty to any country is treason to 
mankind. 

IX 

"God is on our side!" is the vainglorious cry 
of thousands. How few inquire, with humble 
mind and honest heart, "Am I on God's side?" 

X 

"Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself;" 
this is surely a rule than which none can be more 



MOSAICS 159 

golden, for therein is taught a kind of self-love 
that is never selfish. We can love others only 
when we have learned to love ourselves in a noble 
and generous fashion. 

XI 

Universal suffrage is only glorified mob-rule; 
a sort of ragamuflSn respectability. 

XII 

The over-valuation of physical culture is the 
great fault of this age. We are frenzied by the 
too rapid development of our material resources. 

XIII 
I am not averse to hearing a man discourse 
about himself, if only he will make that self 
worthy of the discourse. 

XIV 

Man is the measure of his own universe. Of 
every circle he is the centre. Only that which 
reflects his age-long conflict with destiny has for 
him enduring interest. 

XV 

"Live with the gods," wrote Marcus Aurelius ; 



160 A FREE LANCE 

but that must, I think, depend somewhat upon 
the willingness of the gods to live with us. 

XVI 
Most men had rather be thought wiclced than 
weak, and yet this choice is itself a weakness. 

XVII 
Habit is the old man's delight. 

XVIII 

**A lie," wrote Sophocles, "never lives to be 
old." Perhaps not, but it lives to do mischief. 

XIX 

If the source of all wrongdoing is in the will, 
so also is the hidden root of every worthy ac- 
tion. Not what I am, but what I would be is 
the one important thing. Whether I perceive 
it or not, I am proceeding in the direction of 
my desire. 

XX 

The man who strives to forget Death only 
thinks of it the more. There is for all of us 
but one way of escape from its impending 
shadow, and that we find in strong and noble 
living. 



MOSAICS 161 

XXI 

The rule of the majority is often a very un- 
worthy one. Good government is the gift of 
the trained few to the incompetent and thought- 
less multitude. 

XXII 
His lot is one of drudgery whose work is not 
a part of himself. 

XXIII 
No victory is final that is not just. 

XXIV 

A man's dread of death and a child's fear of 
darkness are the same thing. In both cases, 
Imagination is the terror-worker, and in both 
cases the remedy is Light. 

XXV 

In the end a man's rights and his necessities 
are one. 

XXVI 

The voices that shouted, "Hosanna to the 
Son of David !" cried a few hours later, "Crucify 
Him! Crucify Him!" Popular applause and 
popular clamor come in the end to one and the 
same thing. The hemlock and the statue are 
never far apart. 



162 A FREE LANCE 

XXVII 
God is not God because He is infinite, for 
space and duration are also infinite; but He 
would not be God were He not infinite. 

XXVIII 

We speak of the foreknowledge of God, but 
how can One who never was nor ever will be, but 
always is, know one thing before another? The 
Infinite is timeless, and, therefore, without pro- 
gression. 

XXIX 

I doubt all arguments about God. How can 
one reason about a Being who is above all logic, 
and whose will is law? Yet God is not in His 
nature, nor yet in His attributes, contrary to 
reason; He is superior to reason. 

XXX 

The man who contemplates his own littleness 
without humility, and his own imperfections 
without disgust, neither loves holiness nor fears 
sin. 

XXXI 

A pure democracy means savagery. A gov- 
ernment in which one man is of as much impor- 
tance as his neighbor is one in which no one is 



MOSAICS 163 

of any importance. The man who advocates 
such a government is either a fool or a 
demagogue. 

XXXII 

There are men who believe in a mobocracy in 
which every man is his own lawyer, jury and 
judge. The man who wins his case in such 
a government is the one who is most vocif- 
erous. Whether a man executes or gets exe- 
cuted will depend upon the strength of his biceps 
muscle. The man who wants that kind of gov- 
ernment should support Theodore Roosevelt. 

XXXIII 

Materiahsm as a system is easily demolished, 
because it is without foundation ; but materialism 
as a tendency of the worldly mind is impregnable 
save to Divine Grace, because it has a real foun- 
dation in the nature of the man who entertains 
it. 

XXXIV 

Men who decry speculation still call them- 
selves scientific, and yet no science could live 
without speculation. But the speculation must 
be in some measure fruitful — it must lead up to 
facts. Experimentation, in which every man of 
science believes, lies behind most of the great 



164 A FREE LANCE 

discoveries, and yet speculation is nothing but 
mental experimentation. 

XXXV 

It is generally believed that the majority 
should rule, but I think our world would be in 
a much better condition were the minority in 
power. The few are wiser than the many. The 
opinion of a judge is usually worth more than 
that of a jury. 

XXXVI 

The strong nature is elastic. A weak nature 
breaks because it cannot bend. Obstinate men 
are never strong. 

XXXVII 

There are those who think Nietzsche's lack of 
geniality and of consideration for others was due 
to the fact that he never married. They think 
that with a good wife other good things would 
have come to him. But what about the wife? 
Is it worth while to reform a man by deforming 
a woman? Is, then, a man worth so much more 
than a woman? 

XXXVIII 
Of all selfish men in the intellectual world, I 



LAIS DEDICATES HER MIRROR 165 

think Nietzsche and Schopenhauer the most self- 
ish. I wonder if Von Hartmann was any better. 
If not, I fear pessimism makes a bad showing. 
Scripture tells us "No man liveth unto himself," 
but these men seem to have lived for nothing bet- 
ter than themselves ; nor did they in dying think, 
so far as we know, of anything better than them- 
selves. 



LAIS DEDICATES HER MIRROR TO 

VENUS 

QEPTEMBER 1, 1912. Came upon Prior's 
^^ translation of Plato's lines on Lais in her 
old age, dedicating her mirror to Venus. Prior 
does not say that it was Lais who made the 
dedication; he calls her "a lady," and we must 
go to the Greek to discover her identity. He 
describes her mirror as a "looking glass," though 
it was, doubtless, a burnished metal mirror such 
as women in Rome used at that time. What most 
interests me in this connection is the fact that 
some years ago I came upon Plato's lines when 
I had not yet seen Prior's version. I translated 
the Greek lines in their entirety, and the transla- 
tion was published in my "Flowers of Song from 
Many Lands," Prior translated only the first 



166 A FREE LANCE 

four lines; but Austin Dobson says that they 
are so good that "Landor might have been 
pleased to sign them." It becomes me to be 
modest, for I am a fellow translator. Below 
are the two versions. 

THE LADY WHO OFFERS HER LOOKING GLASS TO 

VENUS 

Venus, take my votive glass. 
Since I am not what I was; 
What from this day I shall be, 
Venus, let me never see. 

— Matthew Prior. 

lais dedicates her mirror to venus 

Once at Greece proud Lais mocked, — 

With gay lovers laughed all day; 
Now these lovers come no more. 

Mirth and song are passed away. 
Venus, take this glass from me. 

Since I old and wrinkled grow; 
What I am I would not see. 

What I shall be, would not know. 
— F. R. M. in "Flowers of Song from Many Lands.*' 

I do not know why the English poet tells 
us his lines are "after" Plato, since they are 



LAIS DEDICATES HER MIRROR 167 

not an imitation but a bona fide translation. I 
prefer my own rendition, but that may be be- 
cause it is complete, and also because I am the 
translator. Authors are literary parents, and 
naturally love their own mental offspring. So 
it may be that, were Prior now living, he would 
not give a rush for my lines, much preferring 
his own. We hear of cruel parents who maltreat 
their children, but we never hear that a literary 
father has deserted his own poems or derided 
his own essays. We are more kindly disposed 
toward paper and ink than we are toward flesh 
and blood; we treat more tenderly a printed 
page than a smiling face. May God have mercy 
upon us, and save us from such cruel selfishness ! 
Many a man has given up wife, home, and useful 
service to win for himself political or literary 
honor. We are so easily allured and carried 
away by the vanity of our own foolish hearts. I 
cannot think that preferring the evanescent 
praise of the world is in any way a better choice 
than that of Lais, who loved above all other 
things the flattery of the learned and the great. 
Who was Lais? She was a beautiful and 
dissolute Sicilian woman, who added to her mar- 
velous physical charms the still more attractive 
enticement of fine mental culture. At first the 



168 A FREE LANCE 

slave of Apelles, who loved her, and who bought 
her that he might educate her, she became the 
possessor of great wealth and of even greater 
beauty. Artists studied to reproduce the charm 
of her presence in marble, and for a few brief 
years art, learning, and whatever else was worthy 
of her notice did her abundant honor. All we 
know of her old age is obtained from Epicrates, 
who tells us that she died destitute and alone. 
With her mirror she dedicated and surrendered 
to the goddess of beauty aU that was left of 
her once brilliant life. 

SURROUNDINGS 

A MAN this morning told me that his lack of 
education was mainly due to the meanness 
of his surroundings. But it was in the dirty 
Soho streets that Blake saw the earliest of his 
divine visions. A man may build him a house 
for his soul to dwell in where the sons of mud 
see nothing better than their own rudeness and 
vileness. And in that house, lighted by the glory 
of heaven, he may abide in wonder and gladness 
all the days of his life on earth. Emerson 
heard the song celestial, and gazed upon scenes 
of marvelous splendor in even the "mud and scum 



THE REWARD OF VIRTUE 169 

of things." A man may not be the creator of 
(Circumstances, but neither is he wholly their 
creature. 

THE REWARD OF VIRTUE 

WHAT a comment on the reward of virtue is 
the preservation of Ovid's works. Many 
excellent books of the old Greek and Roman days 
are lost, perhaps forever. Of some of these we 
know nothing save the fact that they once ex- 
isted. Some books have been preserved only in 
part, or in a mutilated condition. Think of 
Livy, represented only by tattered remnants of 
his invaluable history. Think of the perished 
plays of some of the old dramatists of those 
early times. But Ovid, lascivious and blas- 
phemous, lives on, with not a poem lost. Ovid 
was in his own country and age accounted a man 
of evil influence. His own people banished him, 
and his works were regarded as harmful. Yet 
to-day his books, unabridged and in a perfect 
condition, so far as we know, may be had by 
any school-boy for a shilling. I am not sorry 
that his poems have come down to our age, for 
they are of value to scholars, and there is in 
them much beauty and worth. I am glad we have 



170 A FREE LANCE 

them, but I sorrow that we have lost other and 
better works. It seems strange that Time 
should spare all of Ovid's writings, and obliterate 
so much of the work of other authors who wrote 
as well from a literary point of view, and much 
better from an ethical standpoint. 

PHYSICAL CONTACT AND SOCIAL RECOGNITION 

T FIND myself in perfect agreement with 
■*■ James Russell Lowell, who disliked being 
handled. He was pleased with Howells because 
Howells did not want upon every occasion to 
shake hands with him. Lowell often made it the 
condition of his acceptance of an invitation to 
a social or public function, that he should not 
be compelled to shake hands with people. The 
promiscuous shaking of hands is a vulgar and 
offensive familiarity. There can be no more 
reason why a man should take liberties with 
my hand than with my shoulder blade or my 
kneepan. Apart from the rudeness, there is 
something devitalizing in the touch of many 
hands having different magnetic conditions, and 
being, in some cases, capable of conveying dis- 
ease. When I was installed pastor of the First 
Congregational Church in Great Barrington, the 



SOCIAL RECOGNITION 171 

entire congregation filed by the pulpit after 
service, each person shaking my hand and twist- 
ing my arm with what was the next day de- 
scribed in the Berkshire Courier as "a hearty 
good will." I got back into the Manse, when it 
was all over, with a feeling of gratitude that I 
had escaped a compound fracture. 

There lived in Middletown, N. Y., where I 
was for a time the pastor of a Congregational 
Church, a man who was in the habit of emphasiz- 
ing what he had to say by poking his finger into 
the ribs of his! interlocutor. He called it "nudg- 
ing," but it was, in fact, nothing less than an 
ofi^ered indignity. It got him into trouble, for 
one day, having waxed peculiarly earnest in con- 
versation with a stranger, he gave him an unus- 
ually vicious thrust, and in return had his hat 
knocked from his head. Buttonholing a man to 
prevent him from escaping a long-winded dis- 
course is another atrocious familiarity ; it is also 
an abridgment of a natural right, for every one 
has an inalienable right (if any such right there 
be) to shake oif, with whatever violence may 
be necessary, the wearisome bore. Like a vam- 
pire that sucks the very life from a man, the 
bore exhausts the vitality of whoever must, for 
one reason or another, listen to his dreary and 



172 A FREE LANCE 

interminable flow of words. I have known an 
old dotard to drive an entire company well-nigh 
crazy because no person could be found rude 
enough to check his wearisome iteration of mean- 
ingless words. The true gentleman fences him- 
self about with propriety. He observes the fit- 
ness of things, and has great respect for es- 
tablished rules and for the customs that prevent 
encroachment. To the rude and vulgar he seems 
encased by a thin sheet of ice. He will not be 
handled. 

There is a certain animal familiarity among 
men and women of the lower orders of society; 
an expression of kindly feehng through, or by 
means of the sense of touch. Men throw their 
arms around each other, pat each other upon the 
shoulder, hold each other's hand, salute with 
a kiss upon meeting and upon parting. To 
them actual contact seems the only adequate ex- 
pression of mutual interest and good will. They 
fondle each other's children, dandle them upon 
the knee, toss them up and down, and stroke 
them very much as one would stroke a kitten. 
With finer training comes a disinclination to such 
expressions of kindly feeling, and yet there is 
nothing in the training itself that necessarily 
lessens the feeling. Still the reserve is not in- 



SOCIAL RECOGNITION 173 

frequently mistaken for indifference and lack 
of personal interest. I am persuaded that much 
of the misunderstanding between "the classes and 
the masses" comes of just this difference in ex- 
pression. 

It may be inquired, "Of what consequence is it 
whether the one way or the other prevail? Are 
not all our expressions of inward feeling a mat- 
ter of custom and habit only?" Doubtless 
habit has much to do with the differences pointed 
out, and yet there is in them something vastly 
more important. In the respect I show another 
I foster self-respect. Fine address is seldom far 
removed from fine feeling. Behavior is the sign 
we hang out to show others what may be ex- 
pected of us. In what we do we reveal what we 
are. Social distinctions are not wholly ar- 
bitrary. The wall I construct around my field 
is exterior to that field, and is in no sense what- 
ever a part of the field. But social barriers are 
a part of society itself, and for that reason so- 
ciety could not exist without them. The wall 
does not, as has been said, form any part of my 
field, nor is it necessary to the existence of that 
field. It only defines it, and prevents strangers 
from intruding upon it. But the rules and reg- 
ulations with which society surrounds itself not 



174* A FREE LANCE 

only prevent intrusion, but are themselves a part 
of the society they guard and protect. They 
are absolutely essential. There could be no 
society (at least no select society) without them. 
They prevent different classes from flowing to- 
gether. They prevent destructive afBliations. 
But for these barriers all classes and conditions 
of men and women would mix and mingle in in- 
describable confusion. Such a mixing of het- 
erogeneous elements could only prove destruc- 
tive to everything like culture. There is now 
much foolish talk about Democracy. But social 
order leans in the other direction. There could 
be neither society nor civilization without separa- 
tion and walls of demarcation. 

To return to the topic with which we started, 
and of which this paper primarily treats: It 
would be well, I think, to insist upon a radical 
reform in our way of receiving guests at a social 
entertainment or a reception of any kind. For 
a relatively long time (relatively as compared 
with the other "functions" of the afternoon or 
evening) those who receive must remain stand- 
ing in line in some conspicuous place in the room. 
Before them pass in another line the guests who 
have been invited, and who are to be presented 
as an act of social recognition. The point of 



SOCIAL RECOGNITION 175 

contact all along the two parallel and meeting 
lines is marked by the customary felicitations, 
and with these there is the usual shaking of 
hands. The delicate lady who is, perhaps, in- 
disposed, and who under any circumstances 
would naturally shrink from physical contact 
with an entire stranger, must extend her hand 
to the guests, one after the other, as they come 
in the line that often seems to the jaded nerves 
well-nigh interminable. Or, if she feels herself 
excused from the initiative, she must still take 
the hand that is proffered. I do not know what 
is the precise nature of the pathological diffi- 
culty involved, but the taking of many hands, 
one after the other, is to most men and to nearly 
all women a nerve-exhausting experience. Some 
persons can endure it for only a very brief time. 
Those who have talked with me upon the subject 
say that after a little season there is felt at 
the base of the brain a nervous depression which 
is soon accompanied by a corresponding mental 
depression. I know the feeling, for I have ex- 
perienced it many times. At its worst it 
amounts to something like despair. Earth and 
Heaven seem to be failures, and life appears de- 
void of all interest. 

Could the sacredness of the King's person be 



176 A FREE LANCE 

so extended as to cover all men and women every- 
where, there might be more regard in the minds 
of all for personal presence. It was not exactly 
regicide to touch the Royal Person, but it was 
something more than Use majeste. The safe- 
guard was necessary in earlier times, and no 
doubt it is necessary even now. No sovereign 
is safe unattended. But the hedging about of 
the King's person meant more than safety; it 
meant as well honor. Familiarity would soon 
deprive the King of his peculiar dignity. He 
would be as other men, while at the same 
time other men would not be in any wise like 
unto the King. It would be a leveling down- 
ward. 

There are on record several instances of unin- 
tentional disregard of the rules of decorum and 
fitness that hedge about a King. Two men, at 
different times, were guilty of touching the King 
without permission. They were, both of them, 
of high rank and were quite at home in the com- 
pany of their sovereign, and yet neither of them 
was spared. They were put to death. Birth 
and position only made matters worse. They 
might, for aught that could be known to the 
contrary, hold the monarch in contempt. It 
might be that they aspired to the crown. Cer- 



SOCIAL RECOGNITION 177 

tainly the dignity of their rank rendered their 
conduct suspicious. But no man of humble 
birth could be suspected of such treasonable de- 
signs. We fear little from insignificant men. 
The Pope will wash once in the year the feet of 
pilgrims and of begging friars. The act passes 
for one of noble condescension. It is so far 
from wounding the papal pride that it, in truth, 
indulges it, for it wins the applause of the 
thoughtless. It is a sham humility, another 
way of playing Lady Bountiful. You will 
never hear that the Pope has washed the feet of 
Kings, for that would be an act of real humility. 
Kings and Popes may patronize the lowly; they 
may wink at the short-comings of peasants, for 
these can do them no harm. But the case is 
different with men higher up. The beggar may 
be dismissed with contempt, but the noble must 
die. 

Let the gentleman keep his distance if he would 
be accounted a gentleman. All cheap familiari- 
ties disgust. Noble qualities demand large 
space for growth. We cannot honor each the 
other at too close a range. Many logs piled 
upon the fire may extinguish the flame. An 
over-display of afi^ection will destroy what meas- 
ure of real affection there actually is. 



178 A FREE LANCE 

In olden times men were afraid of the Evil 
Eye and of the baneful influence of strangers. 
Against these the King must be defended. A 
deputation from a distant country could not 
come into the presence of the sovereign to whom 
it was accredited before it had passed between 
two fires which were supposed to destroy the 
baneful influences that came with the deputa- 
tion. In the Congo Basin an ambassador could 
not see the King to whom he was deputed be- 
fore he had bathed in two brooks on two succes- 
sive days. The clothes of a stranger must not 
touch the King. All sacred persons were dan- 
gerous to touch. Priests as well as Kings were 
hedged about by rules and regulations. To 
touch the priest was sacrilege and to put one's 
hand upon the King was treason. Royal and 
priestly taboos surrounded all sacred persons 
with a web, the strands of which were unyielding 
as steel and yet so fine as to be invisible. En- 
cased in diaphanous armor, the sacred persons 
were invulnerable. As a bird beats its wing 
against a window-pane, not discerning the glass, 
so most of those who would injure the King 
struck only his armor. Emerson thinks that 
Anderson's story of the cobweb of cloth so finely 
woven as to be invisible signifies manners, but I 



SOCIAL RECOGNITION 179 

do not believe the story has any relation to man- 
ners as we usually understand that word. To 
me the transparent web stands for that fine 
repulsion with which the great invest them- 
selves. It is an armor through which stupidity 
cannot penetrate, and against which the bitter- 
est hatred shivers its lance. It is so fine that 
eyes of glass and brains of mud cannot discern 
it, and yet it is so firm and sure that the elect 
soul may trust it with implicit confidence. It is 
not something put on; it is a subtile spiritual 
atmosphere, clear and cold. The man who has 
this, so Emerson tells us, will need no auxiliaries 
to his personal presence. 

Yet it is also true that no man can be a 
gentleman without kindness. Reserve is one 
thing, indifference is another. The man who 
cares nothing for the happiness of others is very 
far from that compassion which is essential to 
courtesy. Nothing is more rude than selfish- 
ness. The man of fine feeling recognizes the 
relation which he sustains to the surrounding 
world. It was charged against the literary 
men of thirty or forty years ago in New Eng- 
land that they stood apart from their fellow- 
men; that they were cold and inaccessible. Mr. 
Emerson has been described as an intellectual 



180 A FREE LANCE 

icicle. Certain \nts declared that while other 
men had within their veins good warm blood, 
Mr. Emerson had only iced-water, with snow- 
flakes for blood-globules. Boston was repre- 
sented as a city walled in by its own colossal 
conceit and self-importance. No doubt the New- 
England literati were somewhat exclusive. The 
professions and the social circles must, well-nigh 
all of them, adopt defensive measures. Phy- 
sicians have their code of medical ethics so framed 
as to exclude professional pretenders. Lawyers 
have rules and regulations with which they shut 
out from their legal associations wrongdoers. 
Authors protect themselves in the same way. 
Social circles give what is called "the cold shoul- 
der"; and of all cold things, that kind of a 
shoulder is the coldest. The studied neglect of 
a beautiful lady, well painted, powdered, and 
bejeweled, is something to carry dismay to the 
stoutest heart. Women are more gifted than 
are men in the silent but remorseless warfare 
of snubs and contempt. Only those who have 
been wounded know how sharp and effective a 
weapon is a woman's tongue. The French have 
a quatrain that, in my "Book of Quatrains," I 
have rendered into English thus : 



SOCIAL RECOGXITION 181 

Tlie tongue is woman's sword, and to it she doth 

trust ; 
By constant use she keeps it always free from rust; 
Deep in the heart of man she sheathes its glittering 

blade ; 
And lo ! the mighty hero falls before the timid maid. 

Man has no shaft so deadly as is the scornful 
glance of a woman's eye. Women are more 
sentimental, enthusiastic, and gentle than are 
men; but men are more just, serious, and merci- 
ful than are even the most perfectly constructed 
women. I think that the calm, cold, and pol- 
ished indifference attributed to the Boston 
literati (I say attributed, for I doubt if it was 
so hard a thing to overcome as some have 
claimed) would have been much more repellent 
had the great New England writers been women 
and not men. Those who were privileged to 
know personally Emerson, Thoreau, Holmes, 
Lowell, Longfellow, \\Tiipple, and Aldrich aU 
bear witness to the kindness and willingness to 
help others which ever dwelt in their hearts and 
actuated their lives. Octavius Brooks Frothing- 
ham was in his day regarded as a very difficult 
man to approach, and yet Julia Ward Howe, 
who knew him well, told me that he was the most 
courteous and considerate man she had ever 



182 A FREE LANCE 

known, and my limited acquaintance with him 
confirms her statement. Thoreau was in many 
ways different from the other New England writ- 
ers named. He had less interest in his fellow 
men, and was less open to surprises of every kind. 
He lived at the time of the Millerite excitement, 
when many persons parted from property or 
reason or from both. Thousands of men and 
women were expecting the end of the world. 
Thoreau gave no heed to any of these things. 
He said he would not go around the corner "to 
see the world blow up." The common, every- 
day events seemed to him more worthy of at- 
tention; to him they were more important. 
But even Thoreau was not so diflScult to ap- 
proach as many timid souls have imagined. 

Public men are always in more or less peril. 
Their prominence attracts attention; their suc- 
cess awakens envy and jealousy; their peculiar 
opportunity or privilege will often lead men to 
make more or less effort to use such opportunity 
or privilege for their own selfish ends. The 
sovereign is always liable to assassination. 
Wealthy men are often robbed. Men distin- 
guished in the world of letters are, it is true, 
not so liable to personal violence, but they are 
often pursued by fanatics, castle-builders, and 



SOCIAL RECOGNITION 183 

notoriety-hunters. Some of our public men have 
all their peace of mind, no small part of their 
time, and much of their usefulness stolen from 
them by vast swarms of self-seekers. How 
shall they escape these noxious creatures? Has 
the literary man any better weapon at his com- 
mand with which he may defend himself than 
just that "thin sheet of ice" of which so many 
of his admirers complain? To be cordial is 
sometimes to invite destruction. Think of the 
callow crowd of autograph-hunters that pur- 
sued Longfellow and Lowell day and night. 
Think of the strangers from over the sea and 
from over the prairie who pestered Emerson, and 
who could be gotten rid of only by a nipping 
frost. There are a few men who have won in- 
ferior places in literary recognition by attaching 
themselves to men of real ability. There are 
many more who are endeavoring to accomplish 
the same feat. They are the "mixed multitude" 
of Exodus ; they only impede the progress of 
well equipped pilgrims who journey from the 
obscurity of our common birth to the far-away 
literary standing of our dreams. They are as 
"sounding brass and tinkling cymbal," making 
a great noise whilst they contribute nothing to 
the harmony and beauty of letters. Are not 



184 A FREE LANCE 

men of genius and scholarship fully justified in 
guarding their time and toil against such as 
these ? 

FRANCES POWER COBBE 

FRANCES POWER COBBE, with whom it 
was my delightful privilege to correspond 
during the closing years of her useful and beau- 
tiful life, and whose last contribution to litera- 
ture was, I suppose, the brief "Introductory 
Notice" that prefaces my little book, "Conse- 
crated Womanhood," was bom December 4, 1822, 
and passed her early life in a home of luxury 
and refinement. A fashionable school at 
Brighton contributed something to her mental 
equipment, but could not have added much to 
the moral force and unyielding integrity that in 
later years made her the noble champion of so 
many worthy causes, and the kind-hearted and 
self-sacrificing friend of dumb animals. Her 
school was like most, perhaps all, of the schools 
for young ladies at that time: a place where 
showy and empty accomplishments were strenu- 
ously but indifferently taught to the exclusion of 
everything like solid attainment and useful in- 
formation. Young ladies were never allowed to 
know anything about anatomy and physiology. 



FRANCES POWER COBBE 185 

which, with most of the natural sciences, were 
regarded as too vulgar for what was then com- 
monly described as "the female mind." This 
mind, which was supposed to be peculiar to 
women, was represented as being quite too deli- 
cate and fragile for the reception of any other 
kinds of knowledge than those which concern 
themselves with the working of "samplers," the 
doing of various sorts of ornamental needlework, 
the painting of indescribable pictures on velvet 
and china, and the graceful execution of difficult 
figures in the dances of the period. 

Miss Cobbe has left us in her autobiography a 
witty and just description of the educational 
farce to which the young ladies of her day were 
treated, and for which their parents and guard- 
ians spent large sums of money that might have 
been put to better uses. It was only when her 
school-days were ended that her real education 
commenced. She had an active and inquiring 
mind, not at all feminine according to the stand- 
ard of that day. It was a mind disinclined to 
receive anything on faith without investigation, 
and naturally disposed to resent the ill-fitting 
and arbitrary restraints of conventional life. 
Like most of us, she inherited the religious con- 
victions of generations of stout-hearted believers. 



186 A FREE LANCE 

There had been five archbishops and one bishop 
among her near kindred. 

Her father and mother were orthodox — that is 
to say, they were followers of John Calvin. 
Perhaps their Calvinism was of the attenuated 
variety, but it was still Calvinism, and had about 
it much of the frigidity and rigidity of the origi- 
nal article. Against all this, when not yet 
twenty-two years old, she rebelled with a deter- 
mination worthy of her religious heritage and 
of the "solemn and awful" domestic training to 
which she had been subjected. The Evangelical 
beliefs of her home were abandoned, not, as has 
been represented, through the influence of Theo- 
dore Parker, with whose writings she became ac- 
quainted early in life, and with whom she cor- 
responded, but through what may be called a 
natural development of the spiritual perception. 

Thousands of earnest and deeply religious na- 
tures have been led by the early austerity of a 
severely orthodox home (I give the word "ortho- 
dox" its unfortunate but common meaning, 
though it cannot be denied that the word has 
also a good meaning of which it has not yet been 
wholly despoiled by the brutality of ecclesiastical 
fisticuffs), to question and renounce even the 
most fundamental truths of natural as well as of 



FRANCES POWER COBBE 187 

revealed religion. Such convictions as must be 
swallowed as one swallows a nauseous medicine 
are not likely to do much good and may accom- 
plish some mischief. Miss Cobbe's change of 
belief was preceded, as such changes usually are 
in earnest and devout minds, by a long and dis- 
tressing period of spiritual uncertainty, during 
which she plunged into a great darkness of soul 
whence at last she emerged with little or no help 
from without. Her father, who was greatly in- 
censed by what he regarded as a fearful apostasy 
on her part, insisted upon his Church of Eng- 
land doctrines, which were of the old and rigor- 
ous kind, as a sovereign remedy for the sickness 
of her spiritual nature. 

Miss Cobbe fell in with the works of Theodore 
Parker just about the time she was undergoing 
the great change in her faith which gave new in- 
spiration and purpose to her life. The change 
was not in the direction of atheism of any kind, 
but rather in that of a decided and enthusiastic 
Deism. She discarded what is commonly called, 
at least in Evangelical circles, Christianity — 
that is to say, Christianity as a supernatural re- 
ligion. Her views were largely those enter- 
tained by modern Unitarians. The Unitarians 
of to-day adopt the ver}'' opinions they denounced 



188 A FREE LANCE 

Parker for entertaining. So the world goes. 
The heterodoxy of the present is the orthodoxy 
of the future. Men stone the prophets for 
teaching what their children are sure to believe ; 
and they, in turn, stone other prophets, and thus 
from generation to generation the assault is con- 
tinued. No one learns wisdom from the un- 
ending contention that always comes to the 
same result. 

Miss Cobbe entered into correspondence with 
Parker, became his fast friend, was with him 
when he died, and later edited his works. The 
friendship between these two souls was peculiarly 
noble and tender. When they first met (after 
years of correspondence), Parker was sick unto 
death. He would not trust himself too much in 
her society ; he said it made his heart swell too 
high. He had fought single-handed the entire 
religious world, and the appreciation and sym- 
pathy of a woman like Frances Power Cobbe was 
a greater gladness than he thought himself able 
to sustain. The beautiful friendship of these 
two reminds us of the friendship between Dr. 
Channing and Lucy Aikin; a friendship that 
lightened with calm and heavenly radiance six- 
teen years of the great preacher's life. 
"Never," wrote Lucy Aikin to Dr. Channing, 



FRANCES POWER COBBE 189 

**are you forgotten when my soul seeks com- 
munion with our common Father; and when I 
strive most earnestly to overcome some evil 
propensity, or to make some generous sacrifice, 
the thought of you gives me strength not my 
own." 

In 1852 Miss Cobbe was very ill, and for a 
time it was thought that she could not live. She 
was confined to her room many weeks, and the 
thought of the brevity and uncertainty of life 
impressed her mind deeply. From that time 
dates her resolve to work earnestly for the good 
of others; to pass, "like bread at sacrament," 
the truth she had come to know, and which she 
in some measure published in her "Essay on the 
Theory of Intuitive Morals" — a book which she 
tells us was suggested to her by the reading of 
Kant's "Metaphysics of Ethics." It is a noble 
work, full of inspiration, and aglow with en- 
thusiasm for humanity. The reasoning is clear 
and close, and through every page of the book 
there breathes a deeply religious spirit. 

In 1864 Miss Cobbe published her "Broken 
Lights," a book mainly in review of the Eng- 
lish Church. In 1880 she gave the world "The 
Duties of Women." Some of her other works, 
published between the dates already named, are 



190 A FREE LANCE 

"An Essay on Religion's Duty," "The Cities of 
the Past," "Italics," and "Studies New and Old 
of Ethical and Social Subjects." I treasure a 
copy of the last-named book which she sent me 
not long before her death, and which has the 
added charm of a personal inscription. Her 
"Darwinism and Morals" is a book of unusual 
interest. Her "Hopes of the Human Race" and 
her book called "The Peak in Darien" possess a 
certain chamiij not so much of style as of at- 
mosphere. 

Every one knows of Miss Cobbe's interest in 
and work for the "Woman's Suffrage Move- 
ment." With a woman of her temperament to 
sympathize with any cause, especially if the cause 
be unpopular, is openly and aggressively to 
enter the lists of its knights-errant, and go out 
in search of the foe. Of course in England the 
ballot is not so great a power as in this country. 
Here everything is settled by the counting of 
noses. We believe that the unenlightened opin- 
ion of the riff-raff of great cities is a much safer 
guide for us to follow than the mature and in- 
telligent judgment of the educated few. We 
are enthusiastic upholders of the jury system, 
and see no reason why twelve unwilling and ill- 
informed jurymen should not decide some of the 



FRANCES POWER COBBE 191 

most delicate and difficult questions involving hu- 
man life, liberty, and property. One of the most 
picturesque spectacles to be witnessed in the 
United States is a murder trial before a jury of 
sorely perplexed tradesfolk. Six insanity ex- 
perts on one side swear to the mental soundness 
of the prisoner, and as many alienists on the 
other side take their solemn oath that the pris- 
oner is raving mad. The air is blue with affi- 
davits of every description. The medical men 
ventilate their professional jealousies, and the 
legal luminaries exchange personalities. No 
one who has any sense of humor should miss the 
superb spectacle. 

Just what will be the result of the Woman's 
Rights Movement it is difficult to determine, but 
in all probability the entire equality of the sexes, 
when once established (if ever it is established), 
will take some shape not foreseen. The real 
enemies of the enfranchisement of women are not 
men but the women themselves. Miss Cobbe saw 
and regretted this. She found most of her 
friends and supporters in this and many other 
social and political reforms among men. Only 
a few days before her death she wrote me a long 
and earnest letter in which was expressed the 
suspicion that the few women who had found 



192 A FREE LANCE 

their way into the ministry had taken up preach- 
ing and religious instruction not through any 
moral and internal pressure, nor yet through 
any sincere desire for the work in itself, but 
from a wish to be of service to their husbands, 
who were most of them clergymen. One has 
only to read the paper on "The Fitness of 
Women for the Ministry of Religion" in her 
book, "The Peak in Darien," to see how deep 
was her feeling in this matter. 

In the United States a few gifted women like 
Miss Anna Oliver, Mrs. Van Cott, Miss Olympia 
Brown, Mrs. Hannaford, Mrs. Celia Burleigh, 
Mrs. Livermore, Miss Anna Dickinson, and 
Mrs. Julia Ward Howe were public speakers; 
and some of these had prefixed to their names 
the sacred "Reverend." But not one of them 
had ministered ten, or even eight, years accept- 
ably to any one church. I remember well Mrs. 
Celia Burleigh. She was a lady of rare culture 
and charming presence; a good speaker, but 
wanting in physical force. She preached for a 
brief season in Connecticut, but died not long 
after entering the ministry. Miss Olympia 
Brown preached three years for a Universalist 
church at Bridgeport, in the same State, and 
then retired. Mrs. Van Cott was regarded as 



FRANCES POWER COBBE 193 

an eloquent speaker, but her ministry could 
hardly be called successful. 

The closing years of Miss Cobbe's life were 
devoted to the anti-vivisection campaign. This, 
it has been said, was her "literary ruin," and in 
a certain way it was, for it circumscribed her field 
of vision, and lessened her interest in the great 
world of human affairs. It gave to all her men- 
tal processes an intensity that in a poorer na- 
ture might have degenerated into vulgar fanati- 
cism. She founded a "Society for the Protec- 
tion of Animals from Vivisection," and she was 
its secretary for ten years. She wrote one hun- 
dred and seventy-three tracts against vivisection, 
and published countless articles on the subject 
in papers and magazines. Her work for ani- 
mals was in keeping with her work in other di- 
rections. It always reflected the beautiful light 
of a strong and noble character. It may be 
that her views were in some ways extreme, but 
the cause was a worthy one, and she championed 
it in a knightly spirit that won the admiration 
of both friend and foe. 

Frances Power Cobbe died on April 5, 1904, 
at her home in Hengwrt, Dolgelly, North Wales. 
She had risen early in the morning and had 
opened the shutters to her window. As she was 



194 A FREE LANCE 

walking across the room, swiftly and painlessly 
the summons came in the way she had hoped it 
would come. Her funeral took place Friday, 
April 8, and was conducted according to direc- 
tions which were written in her will. Prior to 
the embalming of her body the carotid artery 
was severed by a surgeon. This she had di- 
rected as a precaution against premature burial, 
though of course the process of embalming must 
have rendered such an operation unnecessary. 
She had decided upon the place of burial, which 
was to be close to the grave of her dear friend. 
Miss Lloyd, near "the little ivy-cornered church 
of Llanelltyd." The churchyard and the grave- 
stones that everywhere dot its rich velvety sod 
were clearly visible from her window, and she 
often pointed to the beautiful roses that flour- 
ished so luxuriantly over her friend's grave. 
The cemetery (if such it may be called — it is an 
English churchyard) looks across the tidal 
Mawddach towards Hengwrt, Miss Lloyd's an- 
cestral, and Miss Cobbe's adopted home, where 
for many years the two friends lived side b}?^ side. 
At the home a prayer was offered, and Miss 
Cobbe's favorite hymn, "Nearer, My God, to 
Thee," was sung. The Reverend J. Estlin Car- 



FRANCES POWER COBBE 195 

penter, the distinguished Biblical critic, who was 
a personal friend of Miss Cobbe, conducted the 
services. The coffin was carried to the grave 
in no dark and mournful hearse, but in one of 
Miss Cobbe's open carriages, drawn by her own 
horses, driven by her coachman. No crape was 
worn, and instead of the usual floral decorations 
for funerals, the coffin was covered by a mass of 
red roses. In her will she had written, "I desire 
that my coffin be not made of oak or of any 
durable wood; but, on the principle of earth-to- 
earth burials, of the lightest and most perishable 
materials, merely sufficient to carry my body de- 
cently to the grave, and without any ornament 
or inscription whatever. I desire to be carried 
to Llanelltyd Cemetery, not on a funeral hearse 
or on men's shoulders, but in one or another of 
my own carriages, driven by my coachman, at 
his usual pace. And I desire that neither then 
nor at any other time may my friends or serv- 
ants wear mourning for me." 

Her beautiful spirit has passed into the un- 
seen world, of which she longed to know more, 
and of which we all know so little. She has left 
us books of rare worth, full of deep thinking 
and of the allurement and charm of a vigorous 



196 A FREE LANCE 

yet graceful style, and alive with hope and prom- 
ise. Few women have lived so large and so rich 
a life in the two worlds of intellectual activity 
and philanthropic endeavor. 



JAN 8 1913 



